Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Dolphin can benefit a lot from quadcores, on the most windows-systems, the 1st and maybe the 2nd core are stressed the most by system-applications.
But you can can tell dolphin to only use the 3rd & 4th core (taskmanager), so the 1st core can do the windows-stuff, and core 3 & 4 can fully concentrate on dolphin.
This sometimes gives me a very nice FPS-boost.

Maybe it would somehow be possible two let dolphin automaticly use the last 2 cores ?

the illusion of dolphin 'benefiting a lot from quad cores' is a consequence of your point of view. if you have a quad core and are running a lot of other programs in the background, then it isn't 'dolphin' benefiting - it's you benefiting!
what i'm saying is that if you are running a lot of things in the background when using dolphin and not losing any speed in it then that is one of the luxuries of having >2 cores, but a quad core and a dual core at the same clock speed achieve pretty much the same speed in dolphin.
i know that's kind of what you meant (the first part anyway), but i'm just clarifying - dolphin isn't any better with a quad.

Some interesting conversation... I LOVE dolphin and I have a quad core i7 930 2.8ghz overclocked to 3.52ghz... I have learned so much about game-cube and Wii hardware from the emulation and software standpoint recently using the emu and I'll say I'm impressed. I think that splitting the DSP to a 3rd core would, even a little, help so we should just do it right? Every little frame counts for some of us, besides many games still don't run full speed even on a top end machine. I do FULLY understand the problems with syncing on multi core because I was there when Sega CD was just being made possible to emulate correctly... 2 identical 68k chips running in tandem? What? and imagine splitting of op-codes for the same CPU to two threads? Wow the man that could do that should get a better job I'll tell you that!

Question... The way dolphin works... The video plug ins do ALL the video processing? Are there any blighter effects for post processing done by the GPU that could perhaps be moved to the magical 3rd core? Seeing as open Cl offloads some texture stuff to the GPU for processing maybe there are similar operations that could also be moved.

I do, however, want the emulator to be more mature in terms of compatibility and speed as it is before we start spending time on more multi threading for the moment. SMG music looping is a little more important to me I think or maybe a better Wii-mote plug-in? It's a nice thought bet in reality it's just not the time YET... But a day will come when dolphin is %80+ compatible and runs full speed on a 2.0GHZ single core and then it wont matter at all would it?

Keep up the good work guys!!! I LOVE DOLPHIN AND I LOVE ALL THE DEVELOPERS!!! ROCK ON DUDES!!!