HTPC with AMD A10-5700 not able to run Wii games?Any settings tweaks/recommendations?

[Luu]

Hi,

I'm running Dolphin 3.5 on Windows 8 x64 on my HTPC. It's a AMD A10-5700 APU on a MSI FM2-A75IA-E53 Mainboard.

The CPU is a Quad Core 3.4 GHz with an integrated AMD Radeon HD 7660D - which is basically a HD 6600 series card. The system has 16GB DDR3-1866 RAM (GeIL EVO LEGGERA).

For the past two days I've been trying to get Dolphin running at a decent speed. However almost all games I've tried are pretty much unplayable.

In the beginning I've been using default settings, later I enabled experimental features that are supposed to speed up emulation. However in games like New Super Mario or Super Mario Galaxy the best I could get was around 20 fps with quite a bit of sound stutter. Menus and static screens show 60fps, but as soon as something 3D is being rendered it goes down to 10-20fps. I let the emu render at 1x (which looks very blocky) and scale up to 720p as that's the resolution of the projector the HTPC is connected to. I briefly tried turning on anti aliasing and switched from DX9 to DX11 (just because you never know) but as one would expect it only slowed things down even further.

The system plays relatively recent games like Spec Ops the Line and Assassins Creed III at 720p and High settings and the Windows 8 Experience Index for 3D Graphics and CPU is both at 6.9. So I feel that in principle the system should be powerful enough to run Wii games on Dolphin. I just haven't found the right settings yet.

Has anyone had more luck with running Dolphin on an AMD Trinity based system and would share their settings with me?

[Xalphenos]

There really isn't a corolation between being able to play modern pc games and being able to play dolphin. Basically your cpu isn't up to the task. You could probably play some of the less demanding games but you can forget about the Mario games. You pretty much need an i5 to make them playable and the general advice given around here to play them full speed is sand bridge at 4.5ghz or ivy bridge at 4.2ghz. my only advice is to rebuild. Even an i3 or pentium would perform better than what you have.

[NaturalViolence]

While Xalphenos is indeed right I would expect much better performance out of your system than what you're getting.

With efb copy set to texture, IR set to 1x, and AA off new super mario brothers should run at fullspeed.

Have you already checked the temperatures and made sure that background applications aren't using up a significant portion of your cpu load?

[Luu]

(01-13-2013, 08:52 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: While Xalphenos is indeed right I would expect much better performance out of your system than what you're getting.

With efb copy set to texture, IR set to 1x, and AA off new super mario brothers should run at fullspeed.

Have you already checked the temperatures and made sure that background applications aren't using up a significant portion of your cpu load?

Yes and yes and yes unfortunately. I've even created a 5GB Ram disk and started the ISO from there to make sure the bad performance was not disk I/O bound. The temperature of the CPU is around 47 degrees C, which is about the same it has when running PC games. When Idle it's around 32C.

Though for efb copy I was wondering if it makes a difference if I choose Texture or RAM, since the A10's IGP uses the system memory anyways (which is why I got the higher clocked 1866 RAM for it).
Also I've come to the conclusion that the problem is likely CPU not GPU based, because I can disable pretty much every GPU tweak and I'll still get 27fps at best in New Super Mario (which is about 10fps more than what I get in Galaxy). Than again the CPU is hardly fully utilized:


Also I was wondering if a special AMD Build of Dolphin might help since the A10 is Piledriver based. If I got it right the Piledriver is just a 2nd generation Bulldozer. At my company we use Dell PE R815 Servers with 64 Core Bulldozer CPUs. We would see that for instance a gzip on Centos 6.1 with non-bulldozer optimized 2.6 Kernel takes about 4 times as long as a gzip on Fedora 17 with Linux 3.2. For the Server CPUs AMD has a Optimization Guide that goes into great detail about how binaries that are compiled with gcc 4.7 or AMD Open64 offer much better performance than those compiled with gcc 4.6 and below. I was wondering if the same might apply to Dolphin.

It's just so frustrating. I saw this Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUVdKv2itB4
and in the comments the guy sais his system spec is:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9505 2.83 Ghz @ 3.6 Ghz
4GB RAM DDR2 800 MHz
Geforce 9800GT 512Mb

which sounds believable given the Video is from 2010.

The Geforce 9800GT get's a Score of 5395 in 3D Mark Vantage, while the A10-5700 get's 5584. The Intel Core 2 Quad Q9505 has a PassMark Score of 3886 while the A10-5700 scores at 4485 (which should be about the same for his overclocked system). So all in all I would expect to get about the same level of performance as that guy is getting but I'm soooo far from it. And judging by the picture quality he's even got some graphics enhancements, AA and maybe higher internal resolution active, because with default settings my picture looks alot more blocky. And he is even running Fraps to record the whole thing.

So ya, I'm at a loss here.

[Soopah]

do you use DSP hle or LLE?

cause in the video you posted the guy use DSP HLE

[admin89]

3D Mark Vantage doesn't mean anything in Dolphin , Nvidia 9800GT has much more memory bandwidth than AMD 7660D (57.6GB/s vs 29.9 GB/s) . Not mention Anti-Aliasing stuffs , Nvidia is much better value
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-minimum-specs-video-card

Your CPU is hopeless for one of the most demanding games : Mario Galaxy . Mario Galaxy + LLE back end = i5 3570k @ 4.2GHz .

Those trinity performance ain't that good . Look at Cinebench Single Thread performance , high-end Phenom II x4 outperform A10 5800k (even on multi-threaded benchmark - Cinebench) . If you compare high-end Core 2 Quad/ Core 2 Duo vs Phenom II x2/x4 for the same clock speed ( For example Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.7GHz OCed vs Phenom II 980BE @ 3.7GHz) , Core 2 duo / Core 2 Quad is faster

Dolphin is a dual core application , you should look at single threaded benchmark or Starcraft 2 benchmark
New Super Mario Bros is a "light" game . It has "EFB copies to Ram" set as default , you should change that to "EFB copies to texture" . "EFB copies to Ram" + NSMB kill any mid-range CPU (include yours)
How to change .ini setings :
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-tloz-wind-waker-low-speed-help

[Luu]

That's too bad then. I would have loved to see Dolphin run Wii games on that HTPC. Esp. since I think the A10 in combination with that board and it's onboard bluetooth is such a great package for the price. Also my wife would have been glad to see at least one of my consoles disappear from the living room :-)


Bottom line, the A10-5700 is not fit to run Dolphin for Wii emulation. At least not if you plan on playing New Super Mario or Galaxy.

[NaturalViolence]

It should be performing A LOT better than that. My old Q6600 at 3.2GHz could get 35 fps in that same scene. Your cpu should be giving you similar performance. Sure it's not going to be fast enough to get you to fullspeed like admin mentioned but the fact that my cpu could achieve 3.5 times the performance that you're getting suggests that something is clearly wrong. 10 vps is ridiculous.

Quote:Also I was wondering if a special AMD Build of Dolphin might help since the A10 is Piledriver based. If I got it right the Piledriver is just a 2nd generation Bulldozer. At my company we use Dell PE R815 Servers with 64 Core Bulldozer CPUs. We would see that for instance a gzip on Centos 6.1 with non-bulldozer optimized 2.6 Kernel takes about 4 times as long as a gzip on Fedora 17 with Linux 3.2. For the Server CPUs AMD has a Optimization Guide that goes into great detail about how binaries that are compiled with gcc 4.7 or AMD Open64 offer much better performance than those compiled with gcc 4.6 and below. I was wondering if the same might apply to Dolphin.

Unless you're running the linux version of dolphin, no. The windows builds on the main site are compiled using the latest version of microsoft visual studio. You really can't do any better than that on an AMD cpu.

[admin89]

Mario Galaxy is GPU intensive game . Integrated GPU definitely bottleneck the CPU
He should use lowest seting (1xIR , no AA , 16x AF) for that game

[NaturalViolence]

He already did, he said it made no difference.