Quote:Wow!!! Now there is someone in the know how and plenty of time.
Thanks for the compliment but compared to the devs who actually made this stuff, I'm nothing. On top of that although I may understand the graphics plugin better than most their are a lot of forum users that understand the audio backend and core of dolphin much better than me.
Quote:Can some dolphin creator or mod answer why more cores won't be implemented? I read somewhere that it would take major source code reconstruction, hopefully it wont..
What you need to understand is their is no magic way to say "Ok I want this program to use 3 threads and 1/3 of the work will go to each thread". Proper multithreading means assigning different tasks to different threads that run independently of each other, however sometimes the threads need to run in snych since they depend on each other. Synchronizing threads is extremely difficult and because of the type of program that dolphin is it is a requirment for dolphin to function properly. Also you have to keep in mind that different tasks don't require the exact same amount of work/s so you are never going to get a linear speedup. Right now dolphin has two threads, one for cpu and one for gpu/dsp. Although it is possible to assign a third thread for the dsp you would get less than a 5% speedup because as I mentioned, task loads aren't equal. In other words to summarize multithreading dolphin past 2 threads would be a stupid and an utterly pointless waste of developer time, massive amounts of time in core development and resolving the syncing issues for little if any benefit.
If you still don't understand just say so and I'll give you the "better" explanation. All I did was quote one of my earlier posts since I have answered this question a good 20 times now and I'm kind of lazy right now.
Quote:About RAM..I have 3GB and I've never seen it drain more than 200MB so much isn't needed there except I guess DDR3 could have a minimal gain over DDR2 (as well as a new, strong motherboard).
Memory bandwidth and read/write speeds do have an impact on performance when dolphin is using efb to ram. As for size, 3GB is more than enough. Dolphin can use almost a gig of ram in 64 bit builds with certain games but your right it is usually very low. Quite frankly 2GB is enough for running dolphin on vista/7 but we usually say to get 3/4GB JUST IN CASE, especially since people may have background services running that use a decent amount of memory or god forbid they might be recording dolphin playback with programs like fraps. Also if you have a lot of ram you can always create a ramdisk, store a game iso inside the ramdisk instead of on your HDD and run it from there, which can significantly improve performance in certain situations (most games don't get much if any benefit from this but some do). But you need a lot of ram to do this, 4GB if your running a GC game (it could be done with 3GB if you don't have any background processes running) and 8GB if your running a wii game (it could be done with 6GB if you don't have any background processes running).
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-Ron Swanson
"I shall be a good politician, even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else for that matter. "
-Mark Antony