i5 6600k vs. i7 6700k @ 1080p - F-Zero GX / demanding titles

[action9000]

Howdy! Long-time fan, first-time poster.

I'm looking at building an emulation rig for my living room. The goal is to make as seamless of an experience as possible while upscaling games to 1080p (3x native) resolution for the TV. Ideally I'd like to be able to handle at least 2x AA and 2x Anisotropic filtering.

As a result, I need the build to be able to keep up with (ideally) the entire Gamecube and Wii library without dropping frames, but the two games that are of upmost importance are F-Zero GX and Smash Bros Melee.

60 FPS is a must. Dropping frames and having the rig feel like it's running an emulator because of performance issues is missing the point of this build. It's supposed to feel as identical to playing the original games as possible with the added benefit of being scaled up to 1080p and not needing a handful of cluttery game consoles hooked up to the TV. The odd minor graphic glitch is fine. Performance @ 1080p is 100% top priority.



Assuming I have a high-end air cooler (to handle overclocking) and a powerful GPU, is this achievable with an i5 6600k or will I gain anything tangible from stepping up to the i7 6700k?
On a related note, what about GPU? Would a Radeon 470 cut it or should I step up to the GeForce 1060 or 1070?



I'm considering the following parts for the build:
CPU: 6600k OR 6700k
GPU: Radeon 470 OR GeForce 1060
RAM: 8 OR 16 GB. It's only about 40 bucks more for 16 GB but is there anything to be gained whatsoever for an emulator rig in my living room?
PSU: 650w should be plenty for any overclocking that happens on the build as I'll only be running a single GPU.


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My main desktop (that I'm typing this post on) is a i7 3930k Sandy bridge-E (clocked to 4.2GHz) with 64 GB of DDR 3 RAM and an R9 270x GPU. (It's a workstation machine, hence the ludicrous amount of RAM. I didn't buy that for gaming! )

I'm curious because when running dolphin on this machine my GPU bottlenecks well before my i7 does, at least according to task manager and AMD's performance monitor. I can't maintain 60 FPS in F-Zero GX 100% of the time, mainly because my GPU maxes out. I can't tell for sure where my CPU limits are with Dolphin but Dolphin pushes it somewhat hard.


If I just build an i5 and throw a beefy GPU in it, will that do the trick at 1080p or is an i7 a safer bet if I'm looking for rock-solid 60 FPS at all times?

[ExtremeDude2]

An i7 won't be any faster for dolphin (or an extremely small amount anyway) assuming the same clock speed ofc. More RAM could be useful if you pre-fetch textures. Just about any modern GPU can do 1080p easily in dolphin.

[admin89]

I have no idea about RX 470 but RX 480 has compatibility issues with Dolphin atm (Google "RX 480 Dolphin Emu" and you see) . 8GB DDR4 should be fine for Dolphin
500W 80 plus Bronze should be more than enough , I recommend EVGA because their PSUs are cheap and durable

[action9000]

Awesome, that's a lot of great direction. Thanks everyone.
I'll go with a 6600k and a 1060 GPU most likely.

[Admentus]

If it is just Super Smash Brothers. Melee and F-Zero GX then the hardware you look for it just overkill. Both games are already 60 FPS, you can not run them at any different frame rate, that is just the way how consoles are designed: locked FPS. An Intel i5-4430 and a NVidia GTX 960 are more than enough to play most games at fullspeed (there might be a few exceptions for unoptimized games or when greatly extending the visual experience such as using 4x Internal Resolution with SSAA x8, especially for more demanding games. You certainly need more powerful hardware for 4K SSAA x8, but if you aim to use 1080 and MSAA x2 you like aiming for hardware that is overkill. Anisotropic filtering x8 has no effect on performance, at least for my GTX 960 (older GPU's may through).

For most texture packs, 16 GB is more than enough. Only 4K texture packs you want to pre-fetch actually need that many RAM. So far, only Dan Ladner's Twilight Princess and Hypatia's Wind Waker texture packs require more than 16 GB RAM, unless you downscale it (50% for example) or convert it to DDS while use Ishiiruka. So far,

If 60 FPS is a must-have, you should stay away from the 3D Zelda games. Most fully 3D games in fact, the GameCube or Wii is just not powerful enough to to play those games at 60 FPS, thus limiting it to 30 FPS (or 20 FPS for the N64 Zelda games). There are some exceptions such as the Super Mario Galaxy games (which are natively 60 FPS) or Super Mario Sunshine if you use the Gecko Code to unlock 60 FPS.

Keep in mind, that playing games for the first game may cause stuttering. That is normal as Dolphin is compiling the shader cache. Unlike native PC games, shader cache is not compiled ahead of time. So just keep playing while Dolphin compiles the shader cache, it eventually smoothens out, as long you don't update Dolphin or your GPU / Driver. If so, Dolphin has to compile the shader cache from scratch again, no big deal. For Super Smash Bros. Melee you won't notice much of it, as the game is pretty light-weight itself already.

[naadofett]

(09-03-2016, 07:08 AM)Admentus Wrote: If it is just Super Smash Brothers. Melee and F-Zero GX then the hardware you look for it just overkill. Both games are already 60 FPS, you can not run them at any different frame rate, that is just the way how consoles are designed: locked FPS. An Intel i5-4430 and a NVidia GTX 960 are more than enough to play most games at fullspeed (there might be a few exceptions for unoptimized games or when greatly extending the visual experience such going using 4x Internal Resolution with SSAA x8, especially for more demanding games. You certainly need more powerful hardware for 4K SSAA x8, but if you aim to use 1080 and MSAA x2 you like aiming for hardware that is overkill. Anisotropic filtering x8 has no effect on performance, at least for my GTX 960 (older GPU's may through).

For most texture packs, 16 GB is more than enough. Only 4K texture packs you want to pre-fetch actually need that many RAM. So far, only Dan Ladner's Twilight Princess and Hypatia's Wind Waker texture packs require more than 16 GB RAM, unless you downscale it (50% for example) or convert it to DDS while use Ishiiruka. So far,

If 60 FPS is a must-have, you should stay away from the 3D Zelda games. Most fully 3D games in fact, the GameCube or Wii is just not powerful enough to to play those games at 60 FPS, thus limiting it to 30 FPS (or 20 FPS for the N64 Zelda games). There are some exceptions such as the Super Mario Galaxy games (which are natively 60 FPS) or Super Mario Sunshine if you use the Gecko Code to unlock 60 FPS.

Keep in mind, that playing games for the first game may cause stuttering. That is normal as Dolphin is compiling the shader cache. Unlike native PC games, shader cache is not compiled ahead of time. So just keep playing while Dolphin compiles the shader cache, it eventually smoothens out, as long you don't update Dolphin or your GPU / Driver. If so, Dolphin has to compile the shader cache from scratch again, no big deal. For Super Smash Bros. Melee you won't notice much of it, as the game is pretty light-weight itself already.

On a related note, I installed a new Skylake 6700 (non-k) to replace my old Sandybridge i5 2500k. I did notice an overall performance increase in games, but still notice the occasional hiccup, which I think is related to textures. Your comment about texture compiling is interesting to me. How does Dolphin manage this? Does it restart every time a game is played or does it somehow save some kind of cache file locally on the PC? Although I've noticed an increase in performance, I've still noticed minor hiccups/stuttering in some games like Mario Galaxy I , Rouge Squadron 2, SSBM... granted, I haven't played the games at any great extent since I'm just briefly testing things with the new config. I'm just not sure how much of this could be system-related vs. known emulation bugs with particular games.

I should mention I've got a GTX 970ti and also 8gb of RAM. I've set the game resolution to only 1080p (running on my TV mainly) with the minimum antistropic filtering and no AA turned on.

[JosJuice]

(09-03-2016, 03:57 PM)naadofett Wrote: Your comment about texture compiling is interesting to me. How does Dolphin manage this? Does it restart every time a game is played or does it somehow save some kind of cache file locally on the PC?

This is about shader compilation, not texture compilation. Shaders that have been compiled once are saved to a cache file, so they don't need to be re-compiled the next time you run the game (unless you change Dolphin version, GPU or GPU driver, like Admentus said).

[nursejoy]

From i5 6600K to i7 6700K the performance increases are very small.