Linux vs Windows 7

[gameaddict20]

Hi all,
Firstly I'll describe my setup:
I have a laptop equipped with an i5-2410m, it doesn't have any built in graphics except for the HD3000. I do however run a partially crippled 460 GTX (eGPU) via the expressport on the side giving me pretty good graphics (more info on how to achieve this: http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/2109-diy-egpu-experiences-%5Bversion-2-0%5D.html ). As I understand, the main part for dolphin is the CPU.
With my setup I can quite happily run Wind Waker (GC) at 100% with anti-aliasing on full and internal resolution at 4x which is wonderful (thanks for your amazing work ) but when I try to run metroid prime (GC) on lowest settings I fail to get 100% fps speed (usually around 80%), I'm guessing this is due to the CPU so I was thinking to help this I would move to linux which has less system bloat running on my CPU but due to my unusual setup I'm finding it difficult to install the eGPU drivers so my question is:
Would linux work any better than windows in my setup?
Also what is the best revision to play metroid prime on? (Currently using very latest development)
And finally are other people finding that on the recent dev builds that Wind Waker works much faster on OpenGL? (I thought it was meant to be the other way around for nvidia cards)

Thanks for your help

[admin89]

Quote:With my setup I can quite happily run Wind Waker (GC) at 100% with anti-aliasing on full and internal resolution at 4x which is wonderful (thanks for your amazing work Smile ) but when I try to run metroid prime (GC) on lowest settings I fail to get 100% fps speed (usually around 80%), I'm guessing this is due to the CPU so I was thinking to help this I would move to linux which has less system bloat running on my CPU but due to my unusual setup I'm finding it difficult to install the eGPU drivers so my question is:
Would linux work any better than windows in my setup?

Zelda WW is a light-weight game . Metroid series are all demanding games
Afaik , Windows 7/8 64bit is the best OS for Dolphin

[degasus]

Also dolphin is often CPU bottlenecked in the GPU emulation, so the CPU overhead of the OpenGL driver matters. As the nvidia driver has the lowest overhead, it's the best setup to use the closed source nvidia driver.

[gameaddict20]

Thanks for your help. I guess my best course of action is to install Win 8 and strip out all the bloat.

(05-14-2014, 09:09 PM)degasus Wrote: Also dolphin is often CPU bottlenecked in the GPU emulation, so the CPU overhead of the OpenGL driver matters. As the nvidia driver has the lowest overhead, it's the best setup to use the closed source nvidia driver.

Would using the nvidia driver mean using Direct3D because you can still install a nvidia driver on linux yet you can only use OpenGL.

[Shonumi]

(05-14-2014, 10:23 PM)gameaddict20 Wrote: Would using the nvidia driver mean using Direct3D because you can still install a nvidia driver on linux yet you can only use OpenGL.

On Windows, you'll be able to use D3D or OpenGL. On Linux, you'll only be able to use OpenGL. Afaik, D3D is the only major difference between Windows and Linux, everything else should be more or less equal. OpenGL is, in many cases, faster than D3D, so whichever OS you use should largely depend on how comfortable you are with it.