which GPU to buy?

[silk186]

My 6930 died and I'm thinking about what card to replace it with. It seems that a 270 2gb would be sufficient for most games at 1080p and can OC to 270x performance.
I was on youtube and saw videos of Wii U games emulated through dolphin, in particular Donkey Kong tropical freeze running on Dolphin 4.0.

My build is getting old but it isn't really a good time for me to do a full upgrade. I have an i5-2500k @ 4.3 (stock voltage), 8gb DDR3-1600, and a 256gb 840.
Will the addition of a lowly 270 2gb be enough to run Donkey Kong tropical freeze, Mario Kart 8 and as well as the Zelda and Mario games smoothly.
Would I be able to run them at 1080p and if not would I be limited by my CPU or a GPU.

TL;DL, is it worth it to go 280 or is a 270 enough for Wii U emulation?

[LordVador]

(05-27-2014, 12:58 AM)silk186 Wrote: is it worth it to go 280 or is a 270 enough for Wii U emulation?

There is no Wii U emulation. Dolphin doesn't run Wii U games

[admin89]

CPU is the key for emulation . To be honest , your CPU ain't cut it in some demanding Wii/GC games .
An i3 4130 @ 3.4GHz is equivalent to i5 3570k @ 4.4GHz in Dolphin Benchmark . That should give you an idea how old your CPU is
Even if WiiU Emu existed , you would have a CPU bottleneck anyway

[cyrax33]

The CPU will need to be upgraded to achieve best speeds on both Mario and Zelda games since these are demanding games. If you cant possibly upgrade at this time you can try older builds but these are no longer supported. And seriously, a Wii U emulator, that's definitely fake.

[silk186]

I didn't realize the videos were fake.
It wouldn't expect that much of a performance difference between the i3 4130 and i5 3570k as it wasn't supposed to be a significant improvement in IPC performance.

[admin89]

Haswell is 5->30% faster than Ivy Bridge . In both Dolphin and PCSX2 , Haswell shows 30% improvement over Ivy Bridge
You can view our official Benchmark data here :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkEUvobPn_DcdEo2aEhhdUpnU01tYUtNM3ZVX2d6SkE&usp=sharing#gid=0

[rpglord]

Well first of all, 270 is not a lowly card as you put it, its on par with geforce 660 gtx and certanly is enough for both dolphin and pc games at 1080p.
Second, you 2500k is more then enough for dolphin too, just go for 270 and you will be fine