What makes a good graphics card for Dolphin

cluthz · (This post was last modified: 11-09-2012, 09:52 AM by cluthz.)

I was wondering about what makes a video card better than others in dolphin.
The threads I've seen usually people talks about bandwidth and not amount of shaders and cores.

I've so far only played Xenoblade on my computer and it ran pretty well with everything maxed, but now I'm playing Pandoras Tower which runs fine, but when I go 4x IR and Anti aliasing the FPS drops, so currently I'm running 3x IR and 4xAA.

My current card is a GTX285 which carried over from my last machine and have served me very well for several years.
The card was the last card ever made with 512 bit bus and thus have a bandwidth comparable to everything except the current high end offers, but the core speed and amount of shaders are lower than new cards.

The GTX 285 is 159 GB/sec and a GTX 660Ti is only 144 GB/sec, however a GTX670 is 192GB/sec.
Will a 660Ti be better in dolphin or would I need a GTX670 to have any increase?

I'm not sure if I'm actually gonna upgrade just yet, since it does still a remarkable job with my other games, but I'm very interested in know what makes a graphics card good for dolphin or not. Also a GTX670 is over $500 in my country, and I'm not ready to shell out that kind of money yet, however a 660Ti is just above $350, which could be an option.

I know this shouldn't be related, but I'm running a i5-2500k@4.3Ghz which seems to have no issues keeping up.
(Turning down IR to 1x and not restrict FPS usually gives me 120-140% game speed, depending on where I am)

**admin89** · (This post was last modified: 11-09-2012, 10:45 AM by admin89.)

http://www.hwcompare.com/13226/geforce-gtx-285-2gb-vs-geforce-gtx-660-ti/
Not much difference in performance
The GTX 660ti run much cooler though
Your Nvidia GTX 285 is still the beast
This won't be called as upgrading but replacing the old card
Other thoughts : You should wait for Nvidia 700 series (March 2013) or Maxwell (2014)

**NaturalViolence** · (This post was last modified: 11-09-2012, 10:57 AM by NaturalViolence.)

Quote:I was wondering about what makes a video card better than others in dolphin.
The threads I've seen usually people talks about bandwidth and not amount of shaders and cores.

This is an assumption based on the only data we have to go on. A year or so ago a GPU benchmark was organized on the forums which managed to collect quite a lot of reliable data. The benchmark results suggested that the video memory bandwidth was a major bottleneck on most graphics cards. Cards with twice the memory bandwidth and about the same shader throughput from the same series were achieving framerates almost twice as high when running at high IR.

Quote:I've so far only played Xenoblade on my computer and it ran pretty well with everything maxed, but now I'm playing Pandoras Tower which runs fine, but when I go 4x IR and Anti aliasing the FPS drops, so currently I'm running 3x IR and 4xAA.

I would expect that. Your graphics card cannot handle that IR. Either 4x IR with no AA or 3x IR with 4xSSAA is as high as you can go.

Quote:My current card is a GTX285 which carried over from my last machine and have served me very well for several years.
The card was the last card ever made with 512 bit bus and thus have a bandwidth comparable to everything except the current high end offers, but the core speed and amount of shaders are lower than new cards.

Yup. It does quite well in general. I was using a GTX 260 C216 before I gave it to a friend which is a bit slower but should give me a general idea of where you stand performance wise relative to my setup. High IR + high AA is simply too demanding in dolphin for all but the fastest graphics cards.

Quote:The GTX 285 is 159 GB/sec and a GTX 660Ti is only 144 GB/sec, however a GTX670 is 192GB/sec.
Will a 660Ti be better in dolphin or would I need a GTX670 to have any increase?

I would GUESS that the GTX 660TI would still be better, although probably not by anywhere near as much as PC games. The benchmark ended long before the 600 series cards came out there so I have no real data to base this on. However I am currently operating under the theory that dolphin is actually usually limited by pixel fillrate which is in turn bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. This would explain some of the discrepancies in the results of the benchmark. 600 series cards have more efficient ROPs capable of delivering higher fillrates at the same memory bandwidth. I'm not sure however if it would be enough of an increase to allow you to raise your settings any higher. A GTX 670 would be a more reliable choice in my opinion.

Quote:http://www.hwcompare.com/13226/geforce-g...tx-660-ti/
Not much difference in performance

Please stop using that site for comparisons. It hardly lists any useful data. A GTX 660 TI is probably around twice as fast as a GTX 285 in most PC games.

**admin89** · (This post was last modified: 11-09-2012, 11:28 AM by admin89.)

Quote: A GTX 660 TI is probably around twice as fast as a GTX 285 in most PC games.

I know that .

Quote:I was wondering about what makes a video card better than others in dolphin.

Quote:Please stop using that site for comparisons

Nope

Edit : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/647?vs=520 Better ?

cluthz · (This post was last modified: 11-09-2012, 11:23 AM by cluthz.)

Thanks for the reply!
It's nice to see my aging card still does it's job, and heat it not a concern as I live as far north you can come in the civilized world (Norway).
I also have 2x 140MM and 1x120MM intake on my cabinet and 2x120MM exhaust and a water cooler on my CPU :p

I'm definetly upgrading when the 700 series comes out, because with new console will make system reqs on PC games jump and more and more games with DX11 (Gtx285 is not fully DX11 compliant and f.ex cannot use tessellation, but I run most games in DX11 mode although one or two features are often greyed out.)
AMD is at the moment not an option because I use certain apps that use CUDA acceleration for work.

Anyways for dolphin, have I understood correctly that bandwidth is more important than core speed and amount of cores?
Like a GTX660ti has around 1300 cores and 24 ROPs and my GTX only has 240 Cores, but also 32 ROPs and better bandwidth?

edit: NaturalV clarified this!

**NaturalViolence** · (This post was last modified: 11-09-2012, 11:35 AM by NaturalViolence.)

Quote:Anyways for dolphin, have I understood correctly that bandwidth is more important than core speed and amount of cores?

As far as we can tell that is usually correct. Please take it with a grain of salt though since a lot of guesswork/assumptions were involved to reach this conclusion. Without more data I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this statement.

**ExtremeDude2** · 11-09-2012, 11:35 AM #7

(11-09-2012, 10:54 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote:
Quote:http://www.hwcompare.com/13226/geforce-g...tx-660-ti/
Not much difference in performance

Please stop using that site for comparisons. It hardly lists any useful data. A GTX 660 TI is probably around twice as fast as a GTX 285 in most PC games.

It will post benchmarks if they are available but this one doesn't I guess :p