Would an SSD improve performance?

[AdderDee]

Right now, I have a 500GB 7200RPM drive that I keep all of my GC/Wii dumps on and I was looking to know if using an SSD for the ISOs and Dolphin would improve performance any. Right now, that 500GB drive is the only one in my system. Thanks in advance btw.

[KHg8m3r]

The only place I know where it has any improvements is when creating a new save file for Super Smash Bros from scratch. Other than that, I don't remember any other games that have any type of boost.

[tueidj]

More RAM would be a better upgrade for you.

[DJBarry004]

More RAM won´t help with Dolphin performance at all...

[Link_to_the_past]

(09-02-2014, 08:48 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: More RAM won´t help with Dolphin performance at all...

Exactly, he is being ironic. Since more ram and better HD is usually the suggested solution of people without the knowhow... Op read the https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/ for more info. There is nowhere even mentioned an SSD for better performance and that is for a good reason, perhaps your gamelist will load faster and some shader generation hiccup will be minimized but overall ingame performance will stay the same. And that is because wii and gc used way slower means to transfer game data than what even the slowest hdd can provide.

[tueidj]

I was actually being serious. 4GB means very little will be available for disk-caching, remedying that is a much better option than investing in an SSD (regardless of the application).
The speed used to transfer game data is not the only thing to consider, you're ignoring pagefile access (which is also a lot more frequent when memory is low).

[KHg8m3r]

Dolphin uses less than half a GB of RAM. So as long as you have enough RAM as per what your OS needs, you're done.
I even had Dolphin running on an x64 system with only 2 GB or RAM and it was fine (4 GB is recommended for x64)

[Link_to_the_past]

(09-02-2014, 09:55 AM)tueidj Wrote: I was actually being serious. 4GB means very little will be available for disk-caching, remedying that is a much better option than investing in an SSD (regardless of the application).
The speed used to transfer game data is not the only thing to consider, you're ignoring pagefile access (which is also a lot more frequent when memory is low).

Doesn't dolphin have small memory usage? I never managed it to fill my 4gbytes of memory and come to need to use a pagefile. Oh wait except perhaps when big hi res texture packs are used that might be a problem.

[tueidj]

The windows 7 kernel typically takes up nearly half a gig. Add other background applications and the total will be close to 2GB. That's half the available RAM gone and we haven't even started Dolphin yet, if there's a web browser open too there will be practically no disk cache worth mentioning.

[admin89]

Sure , you can download more RAM for free lol

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Upgrade your CPU to Pentium G3258 + Asrock Z97 Anniversary or "Pentium G3258 + MSI Z97 "bundle for $100 on microcenter and then overclock it to 4.6GHz if you want performance
In Dolphin , Pentium G3258 @ 4.6GHz = Core i7 4790k @ 4.4GHz > Core i3 4130 @ 3.4GHz > FX 8350 @ 5.0GHz > A10 7850 @ 4.5GHz > Your CPU