guru64 Wrote:This is a bit confusing, every benchmark comparison I've seen with ivy, haswell, and sandy i5s show they perform only slightly faster from each other,
That's the problem with benchmarks that don't use Dolphin: they're never going to accurately reflect Dolphin performance. Only a test that measures how hardware performs while running Dolphin will be able to give you a full idea of what that hardware is capable of, for this emulator at least. Everything else is an approximation at best, and useless at worse.
We've seen this plenty of times before. Tests like Passmark don't fully capture how different CPUs handle Dolphin. Dolphin has a unique workload that many benchmarks can't replicate (like dynamically compiling code while simultaneously polling user input while generating various shaders). Take a look at the Dolphin Wind Waker CPU Benchmark (in Hardware) and the more recent Dolphin CPU benchmark in General Discussion.
Whatever changes Intel made to their current microarchitecture really positively affected Dolphin performance. Over Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPUs, Haswell is easily 20~30% faster. After running two community benchmarks proving this, most of us consider the matter settled (of course that doesn't mean there won't possibly be more benchmarks).