Looking for specific hardware for handling "integer math"

[Vincent14]

Hello,

I'm aware that a big improvement has been done about GC/Wii graphics, few month ago with the 5.0 release. The post seems to explain that Texture EnVironment Fixes need a graphic card able to compute in integer math operations, but neither this post or the older one dedicated to the pixel processing problem give any information to find a suitable GPU for this.

I'm building a small computer for mediacenter application under Linux (I have some other needs for this OS) and need to be able to use my graphic card for decoding movies. I know that AMD GPU are very bad supported under Linux, and often lose drivers after some years because Linux updates. In the other hand, I plan to have a dual boot to Windows to try Dolphin emulation. Here is my questions:

First I would know how to find if a card could handle integer math, for example I would buy the Nvidia GT 730 (perhaps the most powerful fanless card), is it good GPU for most of GC/wii games? Some wiki pages says that performances are awful with Nvidia, are they so terrible?

Second, I've read that Intel is best for CPU, but AMD 4 cores are far cheaper than Intel i5, and I've no idea if an Intel dual core is better for Dolphin than the AMD Athlon II X4 845 (3.5 GHz) I plan to buy. What are your tips?

Thanks for your advices

[admin89]

That Quad Core Athlon is not even as fast as Intel Core i3 in multithread benchmark , let alone Core i5
Here is multi benchmark from Anandtech (Dolphin Benchmark included)
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1684?vs=1682
In fact , it's only on par with the Dual Core Pentium G3258 but Pentium G3258 is a monster at overclocking . When it reaches 4.4GHz , your Athlon will be left in the dust
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1684?vs=1265
Also , GT 730 is a terrible choice . It's lack of memory bandwidth and its DDR3 memory is slow . Compare to a GTX 750 , it's like 8times slower . GTX 750 is much slower than a 110$ GTX 1050

[leolam]

AMD CPUs are a bad idea for Dolphin, because of their weak single thread performance.

Also, for Linux, you'll want to use a NVIDIA GPU. The driver situation is getting better with AMD but right now, you'll get the best performance with the NVIDIA proprietary driver.