Identifying the bottleneck?

**NaturalViolence** · (This post was last modified: 01-12-2012, 07:49 AM by NaturalViolence.)

Those game speeds look pretty normal for that cpu. Your HD 4250 is likely the bottleneck even at 1x internal resolution. You can test this by using dolphin 3.0 off of the main site and lowering the internal resolution to 0.5x. If that boosts performance than the gpu is the bottleneck.

Quote:Too bad there's no cohesive user manual, but I guess Dolphin changes too fast for that.

Actually it's because nobody wants to do it Tongue

.

4evrplan · 01-12-2012, 03:14 PM **#12**

I tried 3.0 at 1.0x, 0.5x, and 0.375x native, and it made almost no difference. It definitely seems CPU limited. I'm not really surprised, for a couple reasons. First, so many of the other games ran at or close to 100%. I could even run LEGO Star Wars II at 2x and the only significant slow-downs in the first level were during the heavy smoke and fog effects. Secondly, native PC games seem to run fine at high resolution. For example, I've got the PC version of LEGO HP Years 1-4, and as long as I turn off the advanced graphics option (but still using high resolution textures and rendering at 1440x900) it runs buttery smooth. I did discover, however that 3.0 is much faster than 3.0-368-dirty in general. Using 3.0, F-ZERO didn't drop below 65% during the playable part and was usually much faster. The downside was, it crashed at some point or another every time on the first track, so it was unplayable on 3.0. Seems like a GPU upgrade would get me the 2.5x resolution I want, but F-ZERO is just going to have to be slow for now.

pwnedatdolphin · 01-13-2012, 09:15 AM **#13**

cpu upgrade first, then gpu, upgrade to an i3 2100 and youll be fine

**NaturalViolence** · 01-14-2012, 05:50 PM **#14**

F-Zero is an extremely demanding game, if you want to run it well you need to use an old revision like r6000 and a 64 bit build.

The rest of the games on your list look like they are running very well, especially considering your cpu is a bit subpar by dolphin standards.

4evrplan · (This post was last modified: 01-17-2012, 03:59 AM by 4evrplan.)

I just bought this rig, so I wont' be swapping out CPUs or motherboards for a few years. If however, I get a better GPU, I could run the less demanding games at 2.5x internal - 1440x900 output. F-ZERO's just going to have to wait. BTW, how demanding, CPU-wise, is SS? I'm a good ways into the game on my Wii, but playing in high-def and/or 3d is definitely intriguing. Would love to replay TP in 3d at some point too.

EDIT: Does Dolphin make use of OpenCL or CUDA, and if so, would it offload the CPU enough to make a real-world difference in performance?

**NaturalViolence** · 01-19-2012, 10:36 AM **#16**

Quote:BTW, how demanding, CPU-wise, is SS?

It's pretty demanding. I would expect around 50-60% speed on your system but I could be wrong.

Quote:Does Dolphin make use of OpenCL or CUDA

Yes, we have an openCL texture decoder.

Quote:would it offload the CPU enough to make a real-world difference in performance?

No. GPUs are painfully slow for most tasks.