New to Dolphin. Is my machine up to par?

[cyberyaga]

Hi... I installed Dolphin on my HTPC 3 days ago, and I am hooked. I love it.

My Machine:
CPU: Intel Core i5 760 @ 2.8Ghz
RAM: 4 GB of 1333Mhz
GPU: GeForce 550ti 1Gb Ram.
OS: Ubuntu 13.04

While playing Mario Bros Wii, it will play smoothly (except the sand levels and water). Mario Kart crawls and is unplayable.

I don't know what I'm doing yet, but these are the things I've touched from the default configuration:
Dolphin Settings
Dual core: enabled
Idle Skipping: enabled
Frame limit: 60
Use FPS for limiting: enabled
v-sync: enabled
internal resolution: 1x
CPU Emu Engine: JIT
DSP: DSP HLE
Backend: OpenGL

I've seen videos of people running on lower end systems than what I have. 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?

Please let me know if I need to provide more info...
Thanks in advance for your help.

[Shonumi]

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.

[cyberyaga]

Thanks Shonumi


Guess I'll need to splurge (and ask the Mrs) and get a new MB and CPU. I guess it won't be that bad, since I'm not planning on getting a PS4 or XBOXONE.


I'll play SMB in the mean time.

[caparo8bit]

I was having problems on my pc using Dolphin 4.0 i have the same especs since i moved to dolphin 3.5 works amaizing

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also remove all unwanted programs from start up on yar PC some people also do a doble boot using microxp

[DJBarry004]

(11-11-2013, 04:29 AM)caparo8bit Wrote: I was having problems on my pc using Dolphin 4.0 i have the same especs since i moved to dolphin 3.5 works amaizing

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also remove all unwanted programs from start up on yar PC some people also do a doble boot using microxp

1- You don´t have the same specs he/she has since you have an i3 and he has an i5. i5s are WAY faster than the CPU you have.

2- Anyway, there are some i3 that are more or less at par with some i5 in terms of performance. You may want to specify which i3 you have (get CPU-Z to do this).

[Shonumi]

Anything older than 4.0 is not supported here. Anyone's free to use whatever they want, they just can't expect support from the forums for 3.5. It's always an option, but if the OP encounters issues on 3.5, it's on him to deal with them. We (forum staff) always recommend the latest stable build or development builds, just to be clear.

[LordVador]

(11-10-2013, 03:22 PM)cyberyaga Wrote: Or am I wrong, and need to beef up something else in my system?

You'll have to overclock your CPU.

Once overclocked 760 can do miracles. I've played a lot of games just fine with this processor. Only very demanding games will give you some trouble

[KHg8m3r]

Don't forget under Graphics > hacks to enable OpenMP