Upgrade needed for Xenoblade Chronicles?

[Ali-247]

So I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles (PAL) on my Wii for the first time (yes, I'm very late to the party!) and it occurred to me that there might be some clever HD patching available on Dolphin.

And of course there is! I have just downloaded Dolphin 4.0-6870 together with the Xenoblade Chronicles HD Texture Pack. I have it working but it does not play very smoothly, whether it's 720p or 1080p. Just rotating the camera can cause the framerate to drop a bit and the audio to stutter slightly.

Is it my machine that's too old or do I need to change some of the settings? I have left most of the settings as default except for enabling V-Sync and changing Internal Resolution to 1080p.

Specs
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz
RAM: 4 GB (4 x 1 GB) Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 333MHz (5-6-6-18)
GPU: 1 GB GeForce GTX 560 Ti (MSI)
Mobo: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5W DH Deluxe (LGA 775)
OS: Windows 7 SP1 x64

Any advice appreciated.

[admin89]

Your CPU is the bottleneck . Either overclock it to 3.4GHz or upgrade to G3258 + Z97 mobo

[DJBarry004]

Do you have any chance of overclocking the CPU a bit higher? And about the stuttering, that´s normal when playing the game for the first time; that´s the shader cache being generated.

EDIT: Partly ninja´d. :/

[Ali-247]

Well, I noticed that my CPU temps were a bit high (45C at idle without overclocking) so I decided to try and reapply the thermal paste before overclocking but I may have managed to break something as I can't get the PC to boot any more! :/

Anyway the components are all very old (except the GPU) and I was considering upgrading them recently so I'm not that fussed if I have broken something. But is the G3258 the best CPU choice? Better than a Core i5/7 ?

[z10m]

Well the G3258 is good for Dolphin as it has 2 physical cores and no hyperthreading so also 2 threads and that is all that dolphin can use.
Because it has only 2 cores and unlocked multiplier you can easily overclock it very high even with stock cooling and also it is a lot cheaper than i5/i7.
If you want to play modern PC games though then go for i5/i7 (K) + good cooling so you can overclock high.

[Ali-247]

OK so I managed to get my PC to boot somehow but any attempt at overclocking gets me an "Overclocking failed or overvoltage failed" error after saving changes.

So I think I will go with the G3258 since it is so inexpensive and I'm not desperate to play high-end games. These are the parts I'll probably get unless anyone has better suggestions? Thanks for the advice so far

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258
HSF: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Mobo: MSI Z97 PC MATE
RAM: Kingston Beast 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866


Edit: Oh, and if I want to make use of my Wiimote in Dolphin will I be able to just buy any old cheap Bluetooth USB dongle?

[z10m]

(06-27-2015, 08:30 AM)Ali-247 Wrote: Oh, and if I want to make use of my Wiimote in Dolphin will I be able to just buy any old cheap Bluetooth USB dongle?

Yes it should work with any BT dongle.
Im using very old and cheap dongle and it works fine except the sound that is coming from the wiimote doesnt work well (might be emulator itself and not the dongle dont know)
Bluetooth thats build in my motherboard Im using for Dualshock 3 so I can have both connected.

[Ali-247]

OK this is really weird but Dolphin is now running quite smoothly on my existing PC (haven't received my new components yet). I dumped the DSP files from my Wii just to see what difference it would make using LLE instead of HLE and it seemed to make the game run really smoothly, even with Custom Textures. Which is strange since I thought LLE required more processing power.

But now I've switched it back to HLE and it's still smooth. So maybe it has nothing do with DSP...

Oh well, it still stutters a little in battles so new components should still be useful. Especially since they were so cheap!