Windows Dolphin vs Mac Dolphin

[lamedude]

Does Dolphin have Cocoa? Everyone seems to hate obj C so I'd say its possible any Win32 code is better than its Cocoa counterpart.

[NaturalViolence]

(03-11-2012, 06:11 AM)scummos Wrote:

Quote: Often times direct3d is going to be much faster than openGL even if you spend loads of times optimizing both backends

and often it will be the other way around.

Greetings,
Sven

Ok.....that directly contradicts what you said earlier. If direct3d can be much faster than openGL or the other way around depending on what you're doing (which you just admitting is true) than that means that you're not always going to be able to get the same performance on both even with proper optimization. Depending on the task that you're trying to accomplish it may run much faster on one than the other.

Quote:For example, dolphin is compiled with msvc on windows and with g++ on linux. That definitely is a significant difference. Of course there's many cases where it won't matter, but there's definitely cases where it *does* matter. Even in my 3-line-test program here I can easily see that virtual function calls are faster in clang++ than in g++, and dynamic_casts are faster in g++ than in clang++. I don't have msvc here for testing, but I'm *absolutely* sure there will also be differences.

Yes, but it's not enough to make a sigificant difference to large projects. The standard compilers and kernels for all three major x86 OS for c++ for example are all so well optimized that you're unlikely to see more than a few percent worth of difference in performance, if you see any at all, unless:

1. You're using different frameworks
2. The drivers are playing a major role (GPU stuff for example)
3. You're writing some BS synthetic test to measure only one or two specific operations instead of a practical application.

Without any of these three things it's borderline impossible to write an application that performs very well in one OS and very poorly in another, depending on the programming language (some uncommon programming languages may have very bad compilers for a particular OS, but all major programming languages should have resources that are so well optimized on all three OS that they perform nearly identically in all three environments, with the exception of java on android).

Quote:Does Dolphin have Cocoa? Everyone seems to hate obj C so I'd say its possible any Win32 code is better than its Cocoa counterpart.

I'm fairly sure the answer is no. And yes everyone does hate obj C and cocoa.

[scummos]

(03-13-2012, 04:04 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Ok.....that directly contradicts what you said earlier. If direct3d can be much faster than openGL or the other way around depending on what you're doing (which you just admitting is true) than that means that you're not always going to be able to get the same performance on both even with proper optimization. Depending on the task that you're trying to accomplish it may run much faster on one than the other.

I did? Anyways: Yes, it depends on the task, and it also depends on how you implement it. It depends on both. I just wanted to say this: Any statement of the form "A is faster than B *because* it uses Direct3D, not OpenGL" is invalid without further argumentation why this is the correct reason in that specific case. It is also possible that the guy who wrote A just spent more time on optimizing it, or was just a better programmer.

(03-13-2012, 04:04 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Yes, but it's not enough to make a sigificant difference to large projects. The standard compilers and kernels for all three major x86 OS for c++ for example are all so well optimized that you're unlikely to see more than a few percent worth of difference in performance, if you see any at all, unless:
[...]
Without any of these three things it's borderline impossible to write an application that performs very well in one OS and very poorly in another [...]

Well, first of all I don't really know anything about the dolphin code. But: many applications that require processing power spend large amounts of it in very little code (some twenty-line inner loop, or whatever). If that is the case, it might very well make a difference how exactly you write that down. And if you try different ways to write it down and test which is faster, then you have optimized your application for the compiler you're using, because with another compiler a different piece of code might produce the optimal result. See the dynamic_cast vs virtual function call example, those are in many cases different ways to achieve the same thing (and yes, the difference is significant, it's > 20%).
I really don't know if it's the case for dolphin, I just want to say: It *could* be the case. (In fact I don't think it's the case, as I didn't see dolphin performing any worse or better on different plattforms, given your graphics card is good enough)

(03-13-2012, 04:04 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: everyone does hate obj C

Signed.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:I really don't know if it's the case for dolphin, I just want to say: It *could* be the case. (In fact I don't think it's the case, as I didn't see dolphin performing any worse or better on different plattforms, given your graphics card is good enough)

It's not. The only thing that's significantly faster/slower in dolphin on different platforms is the video backends, and that's because they are heavily driver dependent.

[scummos]

(03-13-2012, 05:30 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

Quote:I really don't know if it's the case for dolphin, I just want to say: It *could* be the case. (In fact I don't think it's the case, as I didn't see dolphin performing any worse or better on different plattforms, given your graphics card is good enough)

It's not. The only thing that's significantly faster/slower in dolphin on different platforms is the video backends, and that's because they are heavily driver dependent.

Agreed! I just wanted to criticize the generality of what you said:

Quote:And how exactly is a programmer supposed to optimize an application like this for a specific OS?

This is what I don't agree with.

[Bloodriotzero]

Hi everyone,

Newbie here just getting into the wonderful world of Dolphin. I've only played GC games so far, not gotten into Wii games yet. I too have a question about Mac performance vs Windows performance (though it might've been answered my the original question). My computer's specs are as follows: iMac Intel Core 2 Duo (E7600) 3.06 GHz (from late 2009), ATI Radeon HD 4670 256 MB GDDR3 graphics, 16 GB Kingston 1066MHz DDR3 RAM, running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. The latest version of Dolphin I seem to be able to run is 3.0-458. All the latest versions CRASH whenever I try to launch the program. I generally have good performance for most games that I've played but cannot play F-Zero GX at all (it IMMEDIATELY slows down at start of gameplay) nor Megaman Battle Transmission (there's an anime cutscene in the beginning that plays FRAME BY FRAME that I can't get past).

My question is will I have better luck playing these games if i install Windows 7 on my machine (via Boot Camp) and install the appropriate software? Will I have better performance from Dolphin OVERALL on a Windows partition on my Mac? And will I even be able to use the latest Dolphin software release?

Thanks for your help!

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:My question is will I have better luck playing these games if i install Windows 7 on my machine (via Boot Camp) and install the appropriate software? Will I have better performance from Dolphin OVERALL on a Windows partition on my Mac? And will I even be able to use the latest Dolphin software release?

Yes, yes, and yes. The first two were answered earlier in the thread.