Personal Advice based on my Hardware

[Soos]

Hi. I recently got Zelda TP (GC version) and I want to play it comfortably, at least somewhat comfortably.

Based on my hardware, what're the settings to maximize my FPS?
What're the settings to give FPS/graphics quality a compromise?
OpenGL/DX9? Copy EFB or not? etc.

Thanks

Cheers

[NaturalViolence]

This isn't a PC game, it doesn't work like that. You don't get to "choose" graphics quality to find a balance between performance and IQ (except for resolution). It's an emulator so when your deciding what settings to use it's more on the basis of higher fps vs. higher chance of errors/problems. Settings also depend on what build your using but for that game I would generally recommend:

Enable Dual Core
Enable Idle Skipping
Unlimited Jit Cache
Framelimit: Auto
HLE the IPL
JIT recompiler
Lock Threads to cores
DSPLLE on Thread

Plugins:
Direct3D9
DSP-HLE

Graphics:
Leave V-sync off
Only force 16:9 if your using the wii version, in the GC version I recommend you use 4:3
Set the resolution to whatever you want
Set AA to whatever you want since it doesn't work in D3D anyways
Leave Safe Texture Cache Off
Enable CPU->EFB access
Enable 16x anisotropy Filtering
EFB scaled Copy
Force bi/trilinear
Enable EFB copy to Ram

Keep in mind that no matter what settings you use you cannot run this game at full speed throughout the whole game on that hardware....or any hardware for that matter. The emulator is still a work in progress and as such cannot emulate all game at full speed no matter how great the hardware it's running on is.

[Soos]

Yea, I understand Dolphin's only an emulator, though a pretty good one.
With this same PC, I was able to beat Zelda WindWaker at full speed through the whole game.
Super Smash Brothers Melee is another game that works really well.
But it makes sense. These games weren't designed for the PC, but rather for their dedicated machines, which Dolphin tries to emulate, a process which involves lots of discrepancies.

I've already been using most the settings you suggested. The game works well for the most part. In small rooms and dungeons it's 30 FPS, but it's bigger areas like Faron Forest/Hyrule Field that mess me up. In Faron Forest, it was like 12FPS and Hyrule Field's like 8, but I guess that's expected. I actually expected worse. I remember reading a few threads and some people with slightly better hardware than me were getting 4-6 FPS in Hyrule field.
I'm at the Goron Mines though, so maybe I haven't seen much of Hyrule field.
But it's still cool that my little laptop's emulating a game machine due to this cool piece of software.

Moreover there are a few sound issues.
What SVN would you recommend for this game?
I'm currently using R4771.

By the way, how much would your whole system cost?
I'm just curious.
It seems like you built your own PC. I'm thinking of building a desktop because it's probably cheaper than buying it.
But I don't live in the States, so getting parts might be a bit expensive, so then again it might be cheaper just to buy a pre-built case.

[Ocean]

I don't think your hardware specs will be a problem for almost any game. The CPU can be a bit of bottleneck in some calculation intensive games, but in general you will achieve near full FPS using efb to texture, framelimit off and dx9 plugin.

Also, r4771 is not bad, but you should look into newer ones as they can have even further improved speed and stability. I find releases at around 4995 to 5000 to be excellent. (I use almost exclusively 5000 x64 now).

Bigger problem is the masses of people who post here asking if they can run a game.. With 6 year old amd processors, integrated graphic chips, 1gb of ram etc.. And big disappointment will follow. As said by Naturalviolence, console emulation and PC gaming is not comparable.

While proper emulation exists for almost all older consoles now, it's made by software and hence there are still lots of graphical bugs and errors in some games. Do you know how much resources it takes to just fully emulate N64 native code with experimental emulator? More than is available for purchase currently. My framerate with pure hardware emulation with nintendo 64 is about 5 to 8 fps and very high heat output of cpu/gpu.

So you can calculate how difficult it will be to achieve perfect emulation state for Wii, PS2, Xbox, etc... It will take years. In fact, due to hardware limitations, high level consoles such as PS3 and Xbox360 are not even possible to emulate at all even with best computer available today. I can safely bet $50 that there will not even be a functional PS3 emulator until at least 2014-2018 (if even then...)

As general rule, the cpu should be at least 10-100x faster than on the original console. But will we have 30/300ghz processors any time soon? Only architecture has changed, but we have been stuck at about 3.2ghz since 2003 or so and it doesn't seem to change.