My experience with the GTX 680 and Dolphin

[Shakan]

I've just upgraded my video card from a Nvidia 560 TI (GIGABYTE GV-N560OC-1GI) to a GTX 680.
Before taking this step I searched this forum for information about the impact of such an investment.
There are some threads that discuss the impact of the video cards on the emulation but I must admit there were different opinions and it really wasn't clear to me if my CPU or my GPU were the bottleneck in emulation.
After some days of extensive "testing" (I was just playing a lot of games) here are my results:

Disclaimer:
I have a very low tolerance of frame rate drops. Even if it only happens every half hour for a few seconds it bugs me. Most GC and Wii gems were playable on my old hardware with higher enhancements but with the occasional change in frame rate. I prefer stability over quality so my own views might not coincide with other gamers views,


With the old GPU:

Enhancements I could enable with a stable framerate at 1980*1080 (DirectX 9 & 11) were:
Internal Resolution: 1,5x (in some games 2.0x)
Anti-Aliasing: None (when activated it completely destroyed the frame rate)
Antiisotropic Filtering: 1x (any higher and there would be occasional FPS drops)

With the new GPU:

Enhancements I could enable with a stable framerate at 1980*1080 (DirectX 9 & 11) were:
Internal Resolution: 4x
Anti-Aliasing: 8x SSAA/MSAA
Antiisotropic Filtering: 16x
Conclusion:
GTX 680 =

Of couse this is only my experience and the results may vary on other hardware combinations but I would recommend anyone who has the spare money to invest in a high-end GPU for emulation.

[Garteal]

Then there has been something severely wrong with your system.
That GTX560 TI should've been able to handle 4x Internal Resolution easily, without SSAA ofcourse.
Anisotropic filtering is something any GPU made in the last 5-6 years should handle without any performance drop.

Just for your information, the DirectX9 and DirectX11 back-ends have different types of anti-aliasing.
DirectX9 has SSAA (broken unfortunately), while DirectX11 has MSAA.
Any GPU thus far will have performance drop when using 4xIR + 9SSAA.
MSAA is very light in comparison and you might be able to run 8x with 4xIR with that GPU.

A high-end GPU is not necessary. My €140,- HD6870 handles everything I throw at it at 4xIR and can handle some MSAA in some games. (I use SMAA otherwise anyway)

[admin89]

There is sth wrong with your 560Ti
GT 540M : 2.5xIR , no AA , 16xAF on most games (include demanding game like Xenoblade)

[Shakan]

Then there has been something severely wrong with your system.
That GTX560 TI should've been able to handle 4x Internal Resolution easily, without SSAA ofcourse.
Anisotropic filtering is something any GPU made in the last 5-6 years should handle without any performance drop.

It worked fine in PC games. On the other hand it had a weird model number and none of the Bios upgrades that came out for that video card which Gigabyte provided worked on it.
It also had a lower clock speed as it should have from the official specs. Maybe there was something wrong with it.

There is sth wrong with your 560Ti
GT 540M : 2.5xIR , no AA , 16xAF on most games (include demanding game like Xenoblade)

2.5IR, no AA and 16xAF was playable. It would provide a constant framerate 99% of the time.
But in some scenes with heavy effects (Xenoblade fights) the frame rate dropped 2-3 % (23/24 FPS instead of 25 or 28 instead of 30 FPS).
When I wrote stable FPS I meant NO drop in any situation ever.
I should have written that in my first post (in fact I will add a disclaimer later) that I have very high standards concerning FPS.
A lot of my friends rather use higher quality settings in video games and trade that in for stability. I prefer stability.

[AnyOldName3]

Still, AF shouldn't cause any noticeable slowdown ever on even the worst of integrated GPUs, so you did have a problem.

[NaturalViolence]

It was probably running at idle clocks.

[Dev1L]

Hey OP, i guess you'll like this one.
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-uno...5xir-build