cyberyaga Wrote:While playing Mario Bros Wii, it will play smoothly (except the sand levels and water). Mario Kart crawls and is unplayable.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii is not a very demanding game (when not using EFB2RAM that is). Mario Kart Wii is more demanding on the CPU than NSMBW and it's also pretty GPU intensive in other parts. Different games will use your computer's resources in different degrees.
cyberyaga Wrote:I've seen videos of people running on lower end systems than what I have.
YouTube videos are a terrible source to judge how systems will run Dolphin. Most video rarely show 1) all relevant settings and 2) the exact Dolphin revision used. Missing 1 or 2 makes it hard to compare your system to theirs since you can't reproduce how they played Dolphin in their video exactly. What's more, many videos are probably using a Dolphin revision older than the one you're using. As a general rule-of-thumb, older revisions usually tend to be faster overall than newer revisions. In the pursuit of accuracy, Dolphin often times has to take more steps (increasing how much the program actually does) to get accurate emulation, which slows down emulation speed in turn.
cyberyaga Wrote:I know CPU cycles is king, but running at almost 3ghz, I'm assuming I should be running at least the first game Mario Bros Wii, really smooth. Or am I wrong, and need to beef up something else in my system?
The unfortunate truth is that even 3 GHz for your system is not enough for Dolphin. Were this 2 or 3 years ago, you would have had a decent system, but like I said, newer revisions tend to be slower due to more accurate emulation. At a minimum for games like MKWii, I'd say now you'd really need a Sandy Bridge ~3.1-3.2 GHz or better (e.g. Ivy Bridge or Haswell). Nehalem CPUs are starting to show their age in Dolphin. The single-threaded IPC increases that the last 3 generations of Intel CPUs bring (Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell) really do blow older generations out of the water when it comes to Dolphin, Haswell especially.
On the plus side, your GPU is rock solid for Dolphin (I have the same GPU, running on Slackware
). As long as you don't set it to ridiculous settings, you can get plenty of graphical enhancements in Dolphin. For Dolphin, the GPU is responsible for the Internal Resolution and AA. I usually do 3x IR with some form of CSAA, 4x IR with no AA, or Auto (Window Size) with 4xSSAA. It's your CPU that's holding you back.EDIT: If you want, you can try overclocking. But you must do your research first (e.g. how to do it properly, if your CPU can be overclocked, keeping temperatures and voltages in check, etc). If you're using an HTPC, the biggest concern is going to be the extra heat overclocking would generate.