Hyperthreading and FPS

[SolarLune]

Hey. So I've been messing around with my computer and just about every setting I could think of to get Dolphin to run faster - I found out that supposedly, r6515 was significantly faster than other revisions.

Trying it out, I found that it was indeed a bit faster. However, most GC or Wii games are still below really playable speeds for me (Trauma Team or Pikmin 2 is running playably (around 50% on Trauma Team and between 65% and 80% on Pikmin 2), but most games are below 50% speeds). Now, I'm wondering if Hyperthreading is good or not - I have a Sony Vaio Desktop PC with 32-bit Windows XP Media Center, and a 3.2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 CPU. While it is only 1 core, with hyperthreading enabled, it 'becomes' 2 (I guess it just emulates the second one using the original core). Is it better to run Dolphin with Hyperthreading and Dual Core enabled, or just with Hyperthreading off? Are there other tips about speeding up FPS I should know about? Thanks!

[Bart1975]

Not sure how much better hyper threading will be for you. That Pentium 4 is fairly weak for dolphin.

[SolarLune]

Thanks, Bart. Now, I'm getting odder tests - I disengaged hyperthreading and then put Dual Core on - with r6740, I'm now able to get full-speed on Chibi-Robo on the title screen, as well as faster FPS in the Chibi-house (so I would assume it carries across to the rest of the game). Could someone explain to me how VPS and FPS works? The FPS is obviously the amount of frames drawn - is VPS is the amount of frames computed? I'm able to get over 100% speed, but it seems to lag (I know that the FPS is low - it's around 1 to 2) - is it a false value?

[Squall Leonhart]

The hyperthreading on P4's doesn't really provide much because the execution pipes are extremely long which results in frequent instruction stalls.

[Bart1975]

You might be able to overclock the cpu a little for better performance. Don't expect any miracles though.

[SolarLune]

Unfortunately, overclocking isn't possible with my BIOS installed on my system. I looked about for updating my BIOS, but I didn't find anything. It's not a major issue - some games run slowly, and others fast - I've made my peace with that (LOL). For me, disabling Hyperthreading, then putting FPS limit to 0 and turning on Dual Core (even though my computer only has one core, LOL), makes it run faster for some games (Trauma Team seems significantly faster to me). I think that it might just be frameskipping, but in any case, it's better than it used to be. Thanks.

PS - I've gotten ClockGen - I believe that may be able to allow overclocking on a locked computer. I may have to try it out, just to see what I can do with it.

[Bart1975]

Yeah clockgen, setfsb, crystal cpuid, etc are all good programs for overclocking.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Could someone explain to me how VPS and FPS works?

FPS = speed of the emulated gpu measures in frames per second

VPS = speed of the emulated cpu

Some more info. taken straight from a forum post by a dolphin dev:

Quote:VPS is meant to be "Video per second" aka refresh rate, that's triggered by the CPU and so is a good representation of the speed of the emulated CPU.
On the other hand, the fps is the actual framerate of the emulated gpu, which is the game speed in most games (but not all, alien hominid for example is not limited by the framerate).

[Squall Leonhart]

vps sounds like vertical interrupts.

[SolarLune]

So VPS is how fast the CPU calls for the screen to refresh... So, if FPS = 5 and VPS = 60, that's full-speed, regardless of the fact that the game is just drawing 5 times a second (on your computer)?