im thinking about buying this cheap video card for an old linux computer for retro gaming. Is it good enough to run most games in dolphin atleast in the native resolution? The cpu is an i3-2120 (sandy bridge) and the machine has 8gb of 1333 ddr3 memory (i cant remember the brand, gonna check if needed) and an old hdd.
r5 240
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07-22-2023, 05:15 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-22-2023, 05:38 AM by Nintendo Maniac 64.)
Yeah that should be plenty for native resolution and should at least be able to manage 2X resolution if not more, and is even GCN-based so you'd get Vulkan support (though you may have to manually switch to the "AMDGPU" driver to get Vulkan, presumably for the R5 240 by enabling "Sea Islands" support but don't quote me on this; but since it's Linux even the OpenGL back-end will be good)
But assuming that the R5 240 you were looking at is used, then I'd like to quote myself from the Linux Mint forums regarding general el-cheapo Vulkan-capable GPU recommendations on Linux: NM64 @ https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p...2#p2341552 Wrote:My go-to recommendations for el-cheap-o discrete GPUs is the Radeon HD 7750 or higher, Radeon 240 or higher, or anything from the Radeon 300, 400, or 500 series (ideally with GDDR3 RAM or, better yet, GDDR5)—a lot of the entry to mid-range models commonly go for $10-$20 USD on the used market nowadays: As an alternative, if your motherboard supports Ivy Bridge CPUs (may require a BIOS update) and has the necessary video outputs then, technically, one option is to upgrade the CPU to Ivy Bridge and just use its integrated graphics since the big improvement on Ivy Bridge vs Sandy Bridge was actually the integrated graphics (Ivy Bridge even supports Vulkan on Linux!...at least partially, but so does Haswell and that's enough to run Dolphin, but I've no idea if Ivy Bridge's Vulkan support is enough for Dolphin... at least Intel's OpenGL support on Linux is stellar). This is of course assuming you're using 2x4GB of RAM and not 1x8GB since only using one stick of RAM would definitely hamper the performance of integrated graphics. But, with a dual-channel RAM configuration, then I would not be surprised if the full-fat Ivy Bridge integrated graphics would be good enough for native considering that even the cut-down version of Haswell integrated graphics in the G3258 is enough for native resolution (Haswell only had a minor improvement in integrated graphics performance vs Ivy Bridge), and you'd get a bit of a boost in CPU performance too of course (which, honestly, is probably your main bottleneck). If your motherboard supports overclocking, then K-sku Ivy Bridge CPUs go for similarly cheap nowadays (e.g. multiple listings for the i5-3570K on ebay at just $15 USD including shipping) and overclocking would help alleviate your likely CPU bottleneck even more (not to be mixed up with the i5-3570 non-K which is locked from overclocking, and an i7 wouldn't really provide any benefit for Dolphin, especially on Linux). Just remember that this was when Intel switched from soldering the IHS to using paste instead, so an overclocked Ivy Bridge CPU would run noticeably hotter than Sandy Bridge. Alternatively, used 4core/8thread LGA1155 Xeon CPUs go for pretty dirt-cheap nowadays but are locked from overclocking and, in theory, some consumer motherboards may not include support for them, and also not every Xeon has integrated graphics:
Dolphin 5.0 CPU benchmark
CPU: Xeon E3-1246 v3 (4c/8t Haswell/Intel 4th gen) — core & cache @ 3.9GHz via multicore enhancement GPU: Intel integrated HD Graphics P4600 RAM: 4x8GB Corsair Vengence @ DDR3-1600 OS: Linux Mint 20.3 Xfce + [VM] Win7 SP1 x64 |
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