Mac Pro upgrade or new machine?

[nulo]

Hey there everyone.

I have a mac pro 2008:

ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256 MB of GDDR3 SDRAM
Two 2.8 GHz (E5462) Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6GB RAM

My question is, should i upgrade the graphic card to something like a HD6850 or a GTX560?
Or will my cpu bottleneck the gpu's?

thanks in advance

[ShadowFlash]

why not, your system us quite powerful for those GPUs, only problem is that dolphin is not really optimized for 8 cores.

[dannzen]

(01-19-2012, 12:12 AM)ShadowFlash Wrote: why not, your system us quite powerful for those GPUs, only problem is that dolphin is not really optimized for 8 cores.

only the single core performance matters for dolphin...
the best chooice is sandy/ivybridge overclocked...

your pc is a working maschine...
not a gaming rig... (i don't think that its recommended to overclock an iMac... is it possible at all?)

install dolphin v3.0
and set the internal resolution to 0.25x ? the slowest value...
and increase it to 0.5 , 0.75, 1, ++
at that point where the fps drops... your gpu bottlenecks
anything below 1x is bullshit and your original wii gaves better "image quality"

[Zee530]

Quote: and set the internal resolution to 0.375x ? the slowest value...

Correction check

[pwnedatdolphin]

its a mac pro, lol, but his cpu is the bottleneck at 1x IR, get a sandybridge or ivybridge

[dannzen]

(01-19-2012, 07:42 AM)pwnedatdolphin Wrote: its a mac pro, lol, but his cpu is the bottleneck at 1x IR, get a sandybridge or ivybridge

??? lol ???

[NaturalViolence]

What everyone is basically trying to say but somehow failing to say is that you should build a new machine with a sandy bridge or ivy bridge cpu.

[ShadowFlash]

Quote:Оnly the single core performance matters for dolphin.

What does this mean ? Dolphin uses 2 threads usually, so minimal CPU must be dual core.
There's 2 simple tests - first i had single core A64 overclocked to hell, which outperformed T6670 almost three times in single core. But... my wife's laptop with slower video card ran NSMB almost at full speed, when my single core machine ran at 60% speed at max.
Second - F-Zero GX, r7120 (one of last ones that ran the game in dual core mode) same settings except tiny checkbox - enable dual core. Dual core - average 68-100 fps at intro, minimum 89% speed, maximum - over 9000 180% speed. Unchecked dual core - 50% speed and sound hiccups at intro.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:What does this mean ? Dolphin uses 2 threads usually, so minimal CPU must be dual core.

Yes but pretty much all modern cpus are at least dual core. Therefore you can judge how well a particular microprocessor will performance with dolphin based on its single threaded performance.