xeon x5482- really this poor, or just me?

[elvisizer]

Hello, I'm curious if the performance on my older Xeon based machine is due to the age of the machine or something misconfigured/not working right.
I'm running dolphin on a couple of machines, but most often on a Windows 7 box that's based on the Intel 5400 chipset , dual Xeon x5482's (3.2Ghz), and 16 GB of RAM (800Mhz FB-DIMMS). It's booting from a 4 way striped raid of SSD's that are connected directly to the pci-e bus, and the GPU is an Nvidia 680 GTX 2gb. audio is built-in realtek ALC885.

aaaand I can't get more than about 18 fps at 1x native internal resolution/no AA/no AF/HLE audio in Xenoblade Chronicles, which results in audio stuttering that is deal-breakingly annoying.
sound about right for this hardware or do I have something messed up?

thanks!

[ExtremeDude2]

Settings?

Also:

(08-14-2013, 12:30 PM)elvisizer Wrote: It's booting from a 4 way striped raid of SSD's that are connected directly to the pci-e bus,

Holy crap dat speed, I don't even want to know

[admin89]

Dolphin is a dual core application , Xenoblade is a demanding games . If you want to run this game well with latest DOlphin , you must have i5 4670k @ 3.4GHz or i5 3570k @ 4.2GHz . Xeon X5482 is dual CPU , right ? It's based on older achitechture . Therefore , it will not be ok with Dolphin
Dolphin doesn't give a damn about SLI , Crossfire , Dual GPU ( only 1 GPU is used ) . GPU will determine which resolution you can use , CPU is the most important factor for speed

[elvisizer]

(08-14-2013, 12:42 PM)admin89 Wrote: Dolphin is a dual core application , Xenoblade is a demanding games . If you want to run this game well with latest DOlphin , you must have i5 4670k @ 3.4GHz or i5 3570k @ 4.2GHz . Xeon X5482 is dual CPU , right ? It's based on older achitechture . Therefore , it will not be ok with Dolphin
Dolphin doesn't give a damn about SLI , Crossfire , Dual GPU ( only 1 GPU is used ) . GPU will determine which resolution you can use , CPU is the most important factor for speed

this is a dual quad core 3.2 Ghz system- 2 cpus, 4 cores each, 8 cores total. they are slightly older cores (discontinued in 2010), but I was hoping the high-ish clock and large number of cores and RAM plus a good gpu would give me mostly playable framerates. I'm not running SLI, I just have the one GTX 680. The comment about the GPU controlling what resolution makes sense, though- I seem to get 18fps at 1x or 4x . . . . .
is xenoblade a particularly resource intensive game to emulate, or is this about what I should expect from most wii games with this hardware?

[admin89]

Quote:is xenoblade a particularly resource intensive game to emulate?

It was not , it is now :/
Latest Dolphin is much more demanding than older Dolphin version
My laptop used to run Xenoblade well
You can use older Dolphin for better speed but keep in mind that there is no support for older version
Check post#126 in this thread

[elvisizer]

(08-14-2013, 01:01 PM)admin89 Wrote: Check post#126 in this thread

that helped! not enough though, only got me up to 22fps.
oh well, it is a 5 year old computer after all! I'm constantly amazed that it can play current day games as well as it can, but that's because they stress the GPU much more than dolphin does. I'll probably just have to wait for my next build to be able to run Dolphin the way I want. I'm due- like I said, it's been 5 years since I upgraded the MB+CPU+RAM, so something as CPU-dependent as Dolphin makes it show it's age.

[NaturalViolence]

elvisizer Wrote:this is a dual quad core 3.2 Ghz system- 2 cpus, 4 cores each, 8 cores total. they are slightly older cores (discontinued in 2010), but I was hoping the high-ish clock and large number of cores and RAM plus a good gpu would give me mostly playable framerates.

1. RAM amount has no effect on dolphins performance.
2. A fast GPU won't improve performance if your cpu is too slow to keep up.
3. Dolphin uses 2 cores. It doesn't matter if you have a 4 core, 8 core, or 16 core cpu you'll get exactly the same performance because dolphin simply won't use most of them. Your system is basically the server equivalent of 2 x core 2 quad cpus. In other words you'll get the same performance as a core 2 quad desktop from 2007/2008. Which is not fast enough for a lot of games.

[cluthz]

(08-14-2013, 12:42 PM)admin89 Wrote: Dolphin is a dual core application , Xenoblade is a demanding games . If you want to run this game well with latest DOlphin , you must have i5 4670k @ 3.4GHz or i5 3570k @ 4.2GHz . Xeon X5482 is dual CPU , right ? It's based on older achitechture . Therefore , it will not be ok with Dolphin
Dolphin doesn't give a damn about SLI , Crossfire , Dual GPU ( only 1 GPU is used ) . GPU will determine which resolution you can use , CPU is the most important factor for speed

Have you actually tried Xenoblade on recent hardware?
You can run Xenoblade at 100% speed on a stock 3570k with latest release.
For some reason people are comparing Xenoblade with The Last Story.

With 4.3Ghz 2500K I can run Xenoblade at 150%-200% speed all the time.. (unless something have changed the last week...)
A 4.2Ghz 3570k would mean that I would need to go past 4.5GHz on my 2500k to play it, which is not the case.
I did finish Xenoblade on a Core 2 Duo 4.05GHz little over a year ago, then with an older revision. (which do need less power, I know)

It might just be me, but it seems you just answer just about any question about performance with "get a 4.2GHz 3570k"...
Consider a 4.2Ghz Ivy would probably beat an 6 GHz Arrandale.

The X5482 is as far as I recall a harpertown, and should be comparable to the Core 2Quad 9xxx series.
I needed to push 4GHz on the E8500, which would mean you would have to get closer to 4GHz to run this, and that is with an older dolphin rev.

I would suggest trying an older version of dolphin with a HLE patch to improve audio.

[NaturalViolence]

cluthz Wrote:Have you actually tried Xenoblade on recent hardware?
You can run Xenoblade at 100% speed on a stock 3570k with latest release.

Latest release != latest build

cluthz Wrote:With 4.3Ghz 2500K I can run Xenoblade at 150%-200% speed all the time.. (unless something have changed the last week...)

On 3.5 I take it? Which is not the latest build.

cluthz Wrote:A 4.2Ghz 3570k would mean that I would need to go past 4.5GHz on my 2500k to play it, which is not the case.

Not true. Ivy bridge and sandy bridge have the same IPC in dolphin.

cluthz Wrote:It might just be me, but it seems you just answer just about any question about performance with "get a 4.2GHz 3570k"...
Consider a 4.2Ghz Ivy would probably beat an 6 GHz Arrandale.

Usually they need new hardware. Might as well recommend them good hardware. These days we recommend them the i5 4670K because it offers by far the best bang for your buck.

cluthz Wrote:The X5482 is as far as I recall a harpertown, and should be comparable to the Core 2Quad 9xxx series.

Yup. I mentioned that in my previous post.

cluthz Wrote:I needed to push 4GHz on the E8500, which would mean you would have to get closer to 4GHz to run this, and that is with an older dolphin rev.

Also correct. And he would need even more than that on an up to date build.

Overclocking xeons however is tricky. Most boards have overclocking outright disabled and if you manage to get around that limited space for the air coolers (since you have two cpus on one board) becomes an issue. And then there is the power consumption and motherboard stability.....yeah. The FSB is already running at 1600MHz, he's not going to be able to push it much further even on a high quality board. And since it's a xeon it won't have unlocked multipliers. Xeon overclocking is tricky and usually not worth it. If he wants fullspeed in xenoblade chronicles he needs to build a new system with a new cpu. That's pretty much all we're saying. His performance is normal given his hardware. Maybe admin exaggerated xenoblade's performance demands but in my experience you do need a high end rig to run it well on the latest build so he can't have been exaggerating by much.

[elvisizer]

yep, the x5482 was the highest-clocked harpertown xeon, 3.2 Ghz.
And, yep, unfortunately, I can't over clock on this system . . . . .the cpu is multiplier locked, so all I could do is up the FSB, and FB-DIMMs are seriously not cool with OC-ing. Also it's a Mac pro, so I can't even get normal access to the emulated bios it uses for windows (it's native boot environment is 64-bit EFi) so even if I had a big desire to fry my stupid FB-DIMMs i couldn't.
And like I said, this mac has been a great workhorse for me . . . . I've been gaming on it under windows and recording music on it under OS X for 5 years now with only storage and GPU upgrades. I've gotten far more mileage out of this thing than I ever thought I would, so I'm fine with waiting until I build my next workstation to check out Xeno. I'll probably build something new based on haswell later this year.

Thanks for confirming I'm not getting unusually low performance for this hardware!