Macbook Pro and Open CL

[aayellow]

I have a current base 15" Macbook Pro with the Nvidia 650M and i7 Quad 2.3 and was having a lot of trouble with settings and slow downs.

Selecting Open CL for textures allows for full speed gamecube and Wii emulation at 1.5 Native resolution or higher.


I was unable to get full speed with anything higher than native res probably due to the i7's relative low 2.3 GHz clock speed, but offloading textures to the powerful 650M has made using dolphin a dream.

Anyone with a similar laptop setup situation should try it out and please continue Open CL development.

[admin89]

Quote:I was unable to get full speed with anything higher than native res probably due to the i7's relative low 2.3 GHz clock speed

No , your Nvidia GPU is not used at all but Intel HD 4000

[DefenderX]

You can force OS X to use the nVidia GPU with the app "gfxCardStatus". This shoul help you to get higher resolutions in Dolphin.

[admin89]

Yeah , you should expect 3xIR on most games and 4xIR on light-weight games

[NaturalViolence]

aayellow Wrote:Selecting Open CL for textures allows for full speed gamecube and Wii emulation at 1.5 Native resolution or higher.

That's quite odd. Most people who have tested the openCL texture decoder have shown either no change in performance or a reduction in performance. Since it increases gpu load it should particularly hurt gpu performance, which you need to reach higher IR without a drop in performance.

aayellow Wrote:I was unable to get full speed with anything higher than native res probably due to the i7's relative low 2.3 GHz clock speed

CPU clock rate has nothing to do with performance/resolution scaling. The reason that you're seeing a large drop in performance at higher IR is because your discrete GPU isn't being used (as others have mentioned).

aayellow Wrote:but offloading textures to the powerful 650M has made using dolphin a dream.

1. A 650M is not a particularly powerful GPU
2. Like others mentioned you currently have dolphin setup to use your IGP not your discrete GPU
3. You're offloading texture decoding. Just saying "offloading textures" could mean nothing, offloading texture mapping, offloading texture filtering/scaling, offloading texture decoding, just moving the textures to a new storage location, or a number of other things. I don't mean to be a perfectionist but please write out the entire proper term next time to avoid any unnecessary confusion.

aayellow Wrote:Anyone with a similar laptop setup situation should try it out and please continue Open CL development.

Currently the devs are considering removing openCL since it hasn't been shown to have any positive impact on performance. You should post some comparison screenshots (two screenshots, one without the openCL texture decoder and one with the openCL texture decoder) with the fps counter option turned on to confirm your story.

[aayellow]

(03-12-2013, 04:26 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: 1. A 650M is not a particularly powerful GPU

Yeah, but its actually quite good for what Apple normally puts in Macbook Pros. Notebookcheck actually ranks it in the top 15 of current cards when you do not consider Pro versions (Quadro's, etc) or SLI setups.

(03-12-2013, 04:26 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: 2. Like others mentioned you currently have dolphin setup to use your IGP not your discrete GPU

Thanks to DefenderX for the gfxCardStatus tip.


Actually, according to gfcCardStatus, my dedicated card kicks in every time Dolphin is started (Dolphin itself not only when a game is started) and back to integrated when closed.

I seem to be getting good speed with the latest builds no matter what my settings are but I will try to quantify what I was trying to say earlier about OpenCL.