Please recommend best GPU upgrade for my mac pro mid 2010

[pleiades7]

Hi there!

Hoping to upgrade my mac pro to improve gaming performance on my mac pro for dolphin.

I'm currently running dolphin on a boot camp windows partitioned SSD on a PCI-express card x4 which gives my hard drive a read/write of 450mb+.

But I'm told the graphic card I'm running is a tad antiquated: my ATI radeon 5870.

What's the best possible card for my system? 2gb or 4gb vram?

I ask for advice because I realize with an older CPU there could be bottlenecking issues. I have 8 cores and 40gb ram but I'm told for this emu that doesn't matter.

So it looks like a GPU upgrade might be best for me.

Any advice is helpful, thanx! :-)

[linker357]

Dolphin emulator only uses 2 cores, so any extra ones won´t boost up your performance by a lot (they would only keep those 2 cores from processing any other background applications) and RAM doesn´t really make a difference either. Rather than a GPU upgrade you would probably see more results with a CPU upgrade since the emulator relies heavily on it to run smoothly for the most part. I have an i5 4670k and an Nvidia GTX 550 Ti and can run all (if not all) of my games with 2x IR on a 1080p monitor and it looks just fine (vivid colors, smooth gameplay) All of my games also run at 100% fps all of the time (except for a few bits and pieces of The Last Story but that´s a pretty demanding game on its own)

[NZtechfreak]

Also suspect CPU is the rate limiting step here.

With my desktop i7 4790K I could run most stuff at 1080p 1.5-3x IR with AA/AF on at various levels depending on the game with my Radeon 6970 GPU. You don't need a card as expensive as the Devil's Canyon though, the i5 4670K that linker357 is using shouldn't be much different in game for example (or some of the even cheaper Pentiums with OC). Anandtech have a section for Dolphin benchmarks so you could check where your CPU is sitting on that table to get an idea.

Regards the GPU - I got an EVGA GTX 980 SC ACX 2.0 this morning, and looks like I can basically max out everything in most games and run at 100% - only exceptions I have found so far is the sand course in F-Zero GX which requires quite low settings to run at a good speed *just like it did on my old card*- which makes me think the CPU is still the rate limiting step in emulating this track.

[KHg8m3r]

(10-08-2014, 11:28 AM)pleiades7 Wrote: But I'm told the graphic card I'm running is a tad antiquated: my ATI radeon 5870.

As long as it can drive the stock resolutions then the GPU is fine. You only need a stronger GPU to make Dolphin look prettier.

(10-08-2014, 11:28 AM)pleiades7 Wrote: I ask for advice because I realize with an older CPU there could be bottlenecking issues. I have 8 cores and 40gb ram but I'm told for this emu that doesn't matter.

You definitely want a CPU upgrade before a GPU upgrade. Your Xeon CPU is a comparable to a first gen i7, which is 4 years out of date now (almost 5).

As the others were saying, Dolphin is only a dual-core program, so only 2 of the 8 cores in your machine will be used. Which means the speed of those two cores is what's limiting you. Since you have the speed of a first gen i5/i7, you won't be able to play the games that are the most demanding. However, the dev builds have gotten a lot faster, so you should be able to play most light to medium games at fullspeed.

If you lower the enhancements to stock (1xIR/AA/AF) and you are still getting slowdowns, then you are CPU bottle-necked.

If you list some of the games you want to play, we can guess at how well they'll play based on benchmarks we've done over the years, and then tell you if you should consider that CPU upgrade.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AunYlOAfGABxdFQ0UzJyTFAxbzZhYWtGcGwySlRFa1E#gid=0 Slightly older benchmark made on a dev build before the most recent speed enhancements

[pauldacheez]

I've actually heard that Dolphin has major performance issues on dual-CPU setups. I've never worked with one of these, can you remove one of the CPUs without the motherboard shitting itself over it? (You'd probably need to remove some RAM, too, since these Xeons may or may not only support 32 GB per CPU.)

[NaturalViolence]

If only we still had the lock threads to cores option this would be a non issue. Forcing dolphin onto the first and fourth thread through task manager will resolve any potential performance drop from the xeon cpus communicating/sharing memory.

[pleiades7]

(10-08-2014, 04:56 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: If only we still had the lock threads to cores option this would be a non issue. Forcing dolphin onto the first and fourth thread through task manager will resolve any potential performance drop from the xeon cpus communicating/sharing memory.

Thank you for all your help gentlemen! You were instrumental in helping me sort this out. I decided to return the mac pro and start over. :-)

[linker357]

If you want you can tell us a budget and we can help you pick the best possible parts under that budget so you can build a pc that can run Dolphin as best as possible.