So recently got the first of too, gtx 460's and while it's not much of a difference, it seems performance has actually moved down alittle, i was wondering if dolphin relied more on the texturing performance of the gpu vs. its' geometry power of pixel fillrate, looking at gpu-z texel/s has gone down slightly after overclocking, pixel fill rate is up and geometry is obviously more powerful now
So i guess what aspect of the gpu is most important for emulation nowadays
Also even though i'm 95 percent sure you can't, is it possilbe to use sli for dolphin
Sli? I don't see why not..
Also the central processing unit is the main focus, gpu importance is next to nothing unless you play on ticking some heavy settings.
I was actually looking into that card I'm planning on purchasing that component in about a month or two.
Is that the 768 Mb version by any chance?
well that's what i'm talking about, is very heavy settings, 1080p, and trying to go with SSAA x4 i've got a core i 7 920 at 3.8 ghz so that can usually handle the cpu end
. Anyways my 275 was able to just barely keep it at 60fps, at SSAA x4 but it appears the 460 is having more trouble, so i have to keep it off, which isn't too much of a deal, since it's already crazy better then then the actually console.
but yeah it's an EVGA gtx 460 1gb EE (external exhaust), and besides dolphin is doing well to outperform it's predecessor, which is kinda weird seeing how much smaller it is lol
Are you using it on the same revision? Also do you have the latest video driver installed?
This is not surprising at all. The 275 and 460 have different advantages. The 460 will only beat a 275 slightly in most cases and in some games it actually loses. Because this new architecture is so radically different many applications like folding@home have had to have their core completely redesigned to work with the new architecture. Games are similar, only newer games that are properly designed for it will be able to truly take advantage of the GF104 architecture, on top of that the drivers are still in the infant stage and each new driver is yielding vast improvements. Most of the processing capabilities of the GF100 and GF104 is still untapped by the latest drivers/games, even in something as simple as vertex shading. I'm not sure if this will improve a lot over time, probably not. Older games using older versions of directx and opengl will especially run faster on the older chips. In fact I can assure you that having a GTX480 would not offer very much, if any, improvement over a 285 in dolphin, that doesn't mean that it's a crappier chip it just means that dolphin really doesn't play on it's advantages (especially the high geometry throughput).
i guess these were things i had already expected, since one 460 is only a marginal improvement, in performance over a 275, maybe with further advancements in the dx 11 plugin and driver updates, maybe performance will improve.
even though i've asked before, does anyone know from experience, if sli can be used in dolphin, since i'm planning to get another card later this month
Nvidia hasn't really made that many advances to warrant an upgrade from gtx275-295
If you really need to get something even more powerful that will actually make a difference (negligible in dolphin though), look for Ati 5970. But for crossfire you will be looking at well over $1,100
Quote:even though i've asked before, does anyone know from experience, if sli can be used in dolphin, since i'm planning to get another card later this month
At the moment the answer is no.
Quote:Nvidia hasn't really made that many advances to warrant an upgrade from gtx275-295
Well the GF100 and GF104 chips are built with 40nm transistors and despite having 50% more transistors (3 billion instead of 2 billion) have about the same die size as their predecessors. Therefore you would naturally assume that the doubling pattern that happens every generation would continue and that these new cards would be at least 50% faster across the board if not more. But the thing that nobody takes into account is in order to build a dx11 capable chip you have to drastically change the graphics pipeline and introduce new hardware such as tessellation and multiple raster units, as well as hardware to handle hull and domain shaders. Basically what happened is most of the transistors were "used up" by the new hardware needed for dx11 capabilities and high geometry throughput. Which means we didn't get the normal doubling we get every 1-2 years. So their is an advantage, dx11. But at the moment their aren't many games that use any of the "major" features of dx11 like tessellation so it's not worth it, in a few years it would be substantially better to have a 400 series card with the same general performance (shader throughput, video memory bandwidth) than a 200 series card. Sorry if I'm being annoying I just wanted to point that out.
ATI took the minimalist approach with R870. They did the absolute bare minimum needed to give it dx11 capable hardware (still has a crappy geometry throughput). However this actually ended up being a much better strategy since it freed up room for memory controllers and SPs and dx11 will have a relatively slow adoption rate compared to previous APIs (except for dx10). And it actually probably won't affect them in the long run either since the 6000 series is coming out this winter and I can almost guarantee that it will have a high geometry throughput. So to determine which chip would be a smarter choice for a game you would simply have to ask yourself one question, does the game use a lot of tessellation? If the answer is yes go with a gf100/104, if not go with an R870.
Was not aware this emulator still lacks sli support. ^
And the 460 still is still a brilliant card, even at its "infant" stage.
I was initially going to say what ocean did, just less bluntly.
While single 460 definitely wouldn't warrant an upgrade, at being at best 10% on average, then a 275, at least until the possibility of overvolting, and pushing even higher then the 834mhz core and 1074mhz mem i've got it out right now. since sli scaling for nvidia is pretty darn close to doubled performance two would be more then a noticeable difference in thing over then dolphin, gaming and folding at home (pitch line you guys should join team 40051 tomshardware =] ) also talking about drivers, personally find it very impressive that they can still squeeze out more performance, out of the older gt 200 line, so i'm looking forward to a long line, of increased performance
well while it's mildly dissappoint i couldn't crank up the eye candy even further, it's not like i should complain since it's normally in 480p instead of full hd, which the other consoles can't seem to do anyways