I got a new i3-4160 and ran the POV-Ray benchmark to compare it with the official results.
I was somewhat disappointed:
but some searching revealed that this is a known issue. Brief explanation: You need to restrain Dolphin to two logical cores (representative of the two real cores in your chip), rather than letting its threads stray across four logical cores. Having set this affinity correctly, the result was improved by ~20%:
Under Windows, create a convenient shortcut for starting Dolphin with the correct affinity by making a .bat file in the same directory as Dolphin.exe, and putting the following in it:
Then start Dolphin in the future from this file rather than Dolphin.exe.
Notes:
* You can also disable hyperthreading entirely in your BIOS/UEFI, but I don't recommend it- although it slows down Dolphin and a handful of similar applications, hyperthreading is a huge net gain in current native games and general desktop multitasking. Best to just set the affinity.
* I have't tested things on Linux yet, and I don't have access to OSX.
* I don't think laptop i3s are hyperthreaded, so this probably does not apply to those. If your CPU has less than three logical cores, this fix will make things slower instead.
* Perhaps Dolphin developers could consider implementing a fix ensuring Dolphin's threads aren't put up for scheduling on more logical threads than there are physical cores? I'm not entirely familiar with Intel's hyperthreading, but I do know that restraining the affinity results in a significant speedup on my 2C/4T CPU.
I was somewhat disappointed:
but some searching revealed that this is a known issue. Brief explanation: You need to restrain Dolphin to two logical cores (representative of the two real cores in your chip), rather than letting its threads stray across four logical cores. Having set this affinity correctly, the result was improved by ~20%:
Under Windows, create a convenient shortcut for starting Dolphin with the correct affinity by making a .bat file in the same directory as Dolphin.exe, and putting the following in it:
Code:
@ECHO off
START /AFFINITY 5 Dolphin.exe %*
Notes:
* You can also disable hyperthreading entirely in your BIOS/UEFI, but I don't recommend it- although it slows down Dolphin and a handful of similar applications, hyperthreading is a huge net gain in current native games and general desktop multitasking. Best to just set the affinity.
* I have't tested things on Linux yet, and I don't have access to OSX.
* I don't think laptop i3s are hyperthreaded, so this probably does not apply to those. If your CPU has less than three logical cores, this fix will make things slower instead.
* Perhaps Dolphin developers could consider implementing a fix ensuring Dolphin's threads aren't put up for scheduling on more logical threads than there are physical cores? I'm not entirely familiar with Intel's hyperthreading, but I do know that restraining the affinity results in a significant speedup on my 2C/4T CPU.