Would anyone mind bringing me up-to-date...?

[dh2005]

Hello there,

I hope this won't be considered a "lazy" thread. If it is, well, I apologise.

I've not used Dolphin for well over a year. I don't mean for a moment to sound ungrateful - I will never know how to program, and I am enormously grateful to people who do (all the more so when they're not getting paid to do it...) - but the emulator wasn't meeting my standards, so I 'bit the bullet' and invested in an NTSC GameCube, NTSC game library, and one of the fabled, rare-as-rocking-horse-shit official GameCube component video cables. Yes, doing these things cost me a shitload of money. Thanks for bringing that up... anyway, I don't know what motivated me to look up Dolphin again last week, but I hit upon a couple of news articles from the back end of 2014 - and, apparently, I missed out on Dolphin's best year ever!!!

Would somebody mind please putting into a nutshell what the key improvements have been over, say, the last fifteen months - particularly since New Year? If you can forgive the crassness of the question, allowing for statistical outliers like Rogue Leader, how far would you say Dolphin is today from being able to play almost all GameCube games flawlessly?

Thanks in advance to anyone able to help.




DH.

[Blacktail51]

Well, apart from some pretty massive performance improvements, there have been a lot of accuracy improvements to: from what I know a whole load of minor to major graphical glitches have been fixed, and... well, at least some of those Star wars games are actually playable through to the end now. Also, you can run LoZ:TP with texcache now without ruining the minimap. I'm not particually sure myself, there have probably been a lot of things other than that too.

[NKF98]

Your system will play any game flawlessly with ir improvements.

[dh2005]

Your system will play any game flawlessly with ir improvements.

Ummm... really?! Can I clarify what we mean by "flawlessly", here? Because I would use that word to mean entirely and perfectly smooth, without hitching and/or crashing. Surely not?! I mean, were that the case, surely the job of the Dolphin developers would be effectively finished - nothing left to do but make it run better on less powerful machines...?

Thanks to both of you for your replies, by the way.

[KHg8m3r]

There are a few outstandng bugs here and there, but your computer can reach fullspeed in all games.

Also, if you want to read up on the most notable improvements, check out the cool stuff in the blog: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

[NKF98]

The i7-4470 is beyond the recommended CPU, the Nvidia 780 series is way exotic for Wii/GC games, and 16GB of ram is like 4x as much as you need for just Dolphin.

[dh2005]

There are a few outstandng bugs here and there, but your computer can reach fullspeed in all games.

Also, if you want to read up on the most notable improvements, check out the cool stuff in the blog: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

Good God... some serious improvements must have been made in the past year. I remember being told in late 2013 that I could do with upgrading my CPU...!!!

So, how brave could I be - in general - with the IR improvements? I appreciate it will vary from game-to-game.

[NKF98]

I don't know much about improving IR, but from reading different threads I think you would be safe at like 4x

[KHg8m3r]

With a 780, you can get past 4x IR (possible with changing the global .ini files)

[dh2005]

Hm. Okay. I'll give that a look...

... what about anti-aliasing? Feasible?