Is dolphin morphing from a CPU benchtest to a GPU powerhouse?

[hedgesmfg]

Hello. First time poster, long time user. Since no one seems to be discussing this directly, I'd like to at least see some thread dedicated to it.

It seems that, since Mid March, the latest revisions of Dolphin have undergone a major revamp in the graphics rendering department. Quite frankly, i find the new results to be very positive and encouraging. For those who haven't caught on, read the post on the main page about the new Pixel Processing methods. Overall, this revamp has done wonders to fix numerous glitches. This, combined with other revisions has, in my experience, changed the nature of what is now possible with this emulator. Overall? I greatly applaud the improvements.

Furthermore, thanks to recent less discussed revisions in the emulator (seemingly having something to do with the asynchronous sound debate? I'm not entirely sure) Zelda Ucode compatability in HLE emulation now seems far, far less glitchy. This, almost by default, has seemingly reduced the CPU requirements of many popular titles to some extent since now HLE emulation can play them (not perfectly) but smoothly enough. Being able to play Mario Galaxy 2 with audio in HLE at full speed is an impressive and shocking addition... though I have yet to test if the grand star crash still happens. I suppose these are two unrelated improvements, but I still felt it important enough to call out both.

With the tradeoff of the latter, I have however noticed a sudden and unexpected performance change in the former. I do not wish to address this issue as a way of complaining, I merely wish to discuss how the community should approach these changes and new requirements and what those of us who wish to cater future hardware toward's dolphin's optimum performance should consider.

Simply put...

Because of the offloading of graphical workarounds and the increased GPU tasking, Dolphin is now a GPU taxing beast for the first time in years. I now find my less than 2 year old GPUs now struggling to run titles that were previously not bottlenecked. Twilight Princess now struggles to hit proper framerates in even more basic areas (not just the Hyrule Field) at 1080p with a 2 year old Nvidia GPU, and despite what the post implies, this framedrop now seemingly occurs in both OpenGL and Direct3D modes. I suppose there could be CPU requirements I could be overlooking, (as that is certainly what plagued Hyrule Field), but I suspect it's more the results of the increased GPU processing. I'm also noticing what seems to be an increase in GPU demand for the Prime games (notably trilogy 1-2 and regular 3).


Is this trend going to continue? Should we start encouraging users to purchase AMD GPU/Nvidia CPU combos for maximum performance? Are users like myself with less than a GTX 780 now effectively boned on some titles? (GPUs are easier to upgrade than CPUs, so I'm not as miffed as you'd think). If we prefer NVIDIA GPUs, will something like the future GTX 860 have better integer calculation, or is that only a premium we can expect in x80 price level cards and above? I am not necessarily complaining, just curious. In essence, does Dolphin now require 400$+ GPUs to get full speed at 3xIR+? Or will this 'truly' be optimized over time? If not, what AMD alternatives now work best with Dolphin?

Again, this is not a blanket criticism stating MAKE IT FASTER like some tend to do. I merely want to bring to attention the fact that it may be time to change the nature of how we discuss Dolphin's future hardware demands (slightly less CPU demand, heavier GPU demand). I'm also very interested in hearing how the new revision is working for other users.

[JMC47]

I haven't read your whole wall of text yet, but Twilight Princess was affected by two other merges shortly before the TFN merge which has made it a lot slower. I wouldn't use it for any kind of benchmark.

As someone who tests a lot of games, A GTX 460 (I have a 470 that can run pretty much anything at 3x) will run just about anything at 2X IR and not be GPU limited, and a 5850 I can guarantee will run most games at 2X IR.

2x IR is near HD, and most games will run at 3x IR on modern GPUs. If you want pure 4x IR for any game (except the aforementioned issues with Twilight Princess) a GTX 760 will do the job in pretty much any game. There are other limitations though that raising the internal resolution causes, like EFB2Ram strain on the GPU thread (which uses your processor, not your GPU). So, yeah, it's not really a good judge as to whether your GPU is getting maxed out anyway

[MayImilae]

Do not use Twilight Princess as a comparison tool. It is a completely unique beast. The reason it's slower isn't because of other changes, but the removal of the ZTP hack. ...and the prime games have stuttering problems so they are a bad comparison tool too (and they aren't GPU demanding as much as GPU THREAD demanding, so still a bad measure). Out of 3000+ games you manage to land on the exceptions. >_<

The only big change to GPU performance in Dolphin was the TFN merger, which was explained at length. As mentioned in the article, the only major GPU hit was OGL performance on Nvidia cards, and that was fixed thanks to an optimization tweak. While there was a GPU performance hit with TFN, it really isn't that bad.

[hedgesmfg]

Guess I'm a bit slow on reading the other threads then.

Overall, I suppose that makes sense. I just never realized how absolutely demanding TP was.

Can you clarify a bit on the demanding nature of the prime games though? For the most part I believe 1-2 still ran close to full speed (though I did actually see slight improvements when going down to 1xR on the 765m + Haswell i7M at 3.6GHZ just to test), but 3 now struggles a bit more than before on my desktop (GTX 660 2GB + i7920 OCed to 4.0GHZ... on the laptop, it seems slower, but it's actually hard to tell). Is the game still primarily CPU intensive (meaning I'd need a haswell 4GHZ+ speeds to play it at full), or what exactly is needed to handle this unique GPU thread? What hardware does it take to run Prime 3 at full speed now?

And yes, every other game was running great. Again, the main reason my post wasn't meant as a complaint was because everything else actually seemed faster compared to when I last benched each game a few months ago. The Zelda Ucode improvement made me downright giddy. I had an occaisional micro stutter in some games, but those only lasted for a bit. Most everything else ran very well (though Sonic Colors currently shows no HUD screen or menu sprites in Open GL...)

Also, I've yet to test it, but is it true that the gamecube version of TP is faster?

[pauldacheez]

The GC version isn't any faster. Anyone who says so is probably *full* of common misconceptions like that.

[ExtremeDude2]

Time for quote!

(02-26-2014, 02:11 PM)skid Wrote: Yes, it is normal for the Wii version to be 50% more demanding than the GC version.

[pauldacheez]

...Well, whatever, it's not like *I* care about running ZTP in Dolphin.

[KHRZ]

As others have said, I don't think GPU requirements have increased much in Dolphin lately. Now if they did, I woulnd't say that's much of an issue, since relative to the CPU requirements, they would still be low, and you can always lower graphics settings anyway.

Now decent integrated GPUs however are beginning to rise, so there could end up being a huge demographic of people that have a strong CPU with low GPU performance... so it's not unimaginable that GPU bottleneck could be a future issue, then again it was way worse for those without a GPU in the past.

[fittyman]

(04-03-2014, 09:53 AM)JMC47 Wrote: I haven't read your whole wall of text yet, but Twilight Princess was affected by two other merges shortly before the TFN merge which has made it a lot slower. I wouldn't use it for any kind of benchmark.

I was able to play TP in the 4.0-1200 era, well, sporadic dips in frames in a lot of places, but something in all of the newer revisions tank TP to 9 frames. It's disheartening. Is that what it is?

[tuanming]

You don't need a GTX 780 to max out the graphical requirements in dolphin. If you have a 3GB vram and a GTX 580 then you have surpassed both Dolphin and PCSX2 GPU reqs. Though I did noticed that the R9 290X 4GB with its 512-bit gave 10 fps boost in Metroid Prime 3 i.e., 64 fps vs 74 fps. This is the only exception when an AMD GPU out performed Nvidia GPUs that I know of. The GTX 580 3GB and the GTX 780 Ti 3GB that I tested in dolphin performed exactly the same!