Quote:Wow!!! Now there is someone in the know how and plenty of time.
Thanks for the compliment but compared to the devs who actually made this stuff, I'm nothing. On top of that although I may understand the graphics plugin better than most their are a lot of forum users that understand the audio backend and core of dolphin much better than me.
Quote:Can some dolphin creator or mod answer why more cores won't be implemented? I read somewhere that it would take major source code reconstruction, hopefully it wont..
What you need to understand is their is no magic way to say "Ok I want this program to use 3 threads and 1/3 of the work will go to each thread". Proper multithreading means assigning different tasks to different threads that run independently of each other, however sometimes the threads need to run in snych since they depend on each other. Synchronizing threads is extremely difficult and because of the type of program that dolphin is it is a requirment for dolphin to function properly. Also you have to keep in mind that different tasks don't require the exact same amount of work/s so you are never going to get a linear speedup. Right now dolphin has two threads, one for cpu and one for gpu/dsp. Although it is possible to assign a third thread for the dsp you would get less than a 5% speedup because as I mentioned, task loads aren't equal. In other words to summarize multithreading dolphin past 2 threads would be a stupid and an utterly pointless waste of developer time, massive amounts of time in core development and resolving the syncing issues for little if any benefit.
If you still don't understand just say so and I'll give you the "better" explanation. All I did was quote one of my earlier posts since I have answered this question a good 20 times now and I'm kind of lazy right now.
Quote:About RAM..I have 3GB and I've never seen it drain more than 200MB so much isn't needed there except I guess DDR3 could have a minimal gain over DDR2 (as well as a new, strong motherboard).
Memory bandwidth and read/write speeds do have an impact on performance when dolphin is using efb to ram. As for size, 3GB is more than enough. Dolphin can use almost a gig of ram in 64 bit builds with certain games but your right it is usually very low. Quite frankly 2GB is enough for running dolphin on vista/7 but we usually say to get 3/4GB JUST IN CASE, especially since people may have background services running that use a decent amount of memory or god forbid they might be recording dolphin playback with programs like fraps. Also if you have a lot of ram you can always create a ramdisk, store a game iso inside the ramdisk instead of on your HDD and run it from there, which can significantly improve performance in certain situations (most games don't get much if any benefit from this but some do). But you need a lot of ram to do this, 4GB if your running a GC game (it could be done with 3GB if you don't have any background processes running) and 8GB if your running a wii game (it could be done with 6GB if you don't have any background processes running).
i would have thought memory is not really a requirement. it doesn't seem to be important. (on a side note, i am running vista x64 3gb ram and i was watching a 1080 i/p HD movie just yesterday and i ran out of ram!!!)
gpu is quite important because it determines which plugins you can use, but that's it as far as i can tell.
cpu seems to be the main factor in emulation and it seems there isn't much they can do in adding more cores. However, if this was done and added significant speed, it would be a breakthrough!
@natural violence,
i see you have a q6600 overclocked to over 3ghz, but i've only really seen an overclock of just under 3ghz for that cpu.
do you know any reliable oc company that can oc my q8xxx
thanks,
(09-16-2010, 06:38 PM)daaceking Wrote: [ -> ]i would have thought memory is not really a requirement. it doesn't seem to be important. (on a side note, i am running vista x64 3gb ram and i was watching a 1080 i/p HD movie just yesterday and i ran out of ram!!!)
gpu is quite important because it determines which plugins you can use, but that's it as far as i can tell.
cpu seems to be the main factor in emulation and it seems there isn't much they can do in adding more cores. However, if this was done and added significant speed, it would be a breakthrough!
@natural violence,
i see you have a q6600 overclocked to over 3ghz, but i've only really seen an overclock of just under 3ghz for that cpu.
do you know any reliable oc company that can oc my q8xxx
thanks,
Enthusiast overclocking is something you do yourself; very rarely does a company overclock a component to its full potential without charging your hundreds for the clock rate increase.
I don't know what is so impressive about a q6600 @ 3ghz.... I got my qx6700 @ 3.8 ghz stable
.
I still get speed issues in games. Therefore, I don't think there is a peak.... yet.
(09-17-2010, 05:49 AM)zurginator Wrote: [ -> ]I still get speed issues in games. Therefore, I don't think there is a peak.... yet.
Are you sure it's your computer? With that kind of hardware it would seem to be the emulator but I don't know..
What games give you slowdowns btw?
Quote:i see you have a q6600 overclocked to over 3ghz
3.2GHz not 3.0GHz.
Quote:but i've only really seen an overclock of just under 3ghz for that cpu
Odd. q6600s can easily be OCed to 3.6GHz on air. Most users have them at at least 3.2GHz. My clock rate is actually considered kind of low for this cpu.
Quote:do you know any reliable oc company that can oc my q8xxx
It doesn't work that way. Like Bigsteeve said overclocking is something you do yourself, not a company.
Quote:i would have thought memory is not really a requirement. it doesn't seem to be important. (on a side note, i am running vista x64 3gb ram and i was watching a 1080 i/p HD movie just yesterday and i ran out of ram!!!)
Ram capacity can be extremely important depending on what your using your system for, it's just that dolphin doesn't use very much ram.
Quote:gpu is quite important because it determines which plugins you can use, but that's it as far as i can tell.
That's not really why the gpu is important. Nearly any gpu that is capable of running dolphin can use any of the plugins. Older gpus may not be capable of using the D3D 10/11 plugin but most of them will not be powerful to run dolphin well anyways so it doesn't really matter all that much. GPUs are important because they literally draw everything you see and perform nearly every task related to rasterization. Nearly the entire process of 3D rendering from start to finish is done almost entirely on the gpu, if your gpu is not powerful enough you will not be able to achieve decent performance with some games, period. It also determines whether you can raise the resolution, AA level, and efb scale without massive drops in performance, which will massively improve the visual quality of your games.
Quote:I still get speed issues in games. Therefore, I don't think there is a peak.... yet.
I don't exactly understand what you mean by "peak". Peak what? Peak hardware (as in any hardware above a certain point is not beneficial)? Peak performance (as in the maximum amount of performance that can be attained from the software)?
Quote:Are you sure it's your computer? With that kind of hardware it would seem to be the emulator but I don't know..
Well fullspeed emulation on ALL games ALL the time is impossible no matter how good your hardware is. And it's not that perfect performance cannot be reached by dolphin because of some kind of software limitation but because hardware that is powerful enough does not exist yet. Certain things just take a lot of computational power to properly emulate. The question is not whether perfect performance is attainable (we already know that answer is an automatic no since we are dealing with emulation) but whether good performance 99% of the time is attainable. So I would change your definition of "peak" if I were you from "perfect" to "close to perfect" since it's a more realistic goal. zurginator may not have perfect performance for example but I'll bet he can run most games at fullspeed.
Prime is slow, F-Zero GX has some issues, Other M is completely unplayable. Brawl is good.
It's not my config, I've been in the Dolphin IRC a few times.
@NV: Peak hardware was what I meant doesn't exist yet. Maybe with Buldozer and Sandy Bridge we'll see some increases.
Quote:Prime is slow
Let me guess, your using a recent revision and your using efb to ram. The new hybrid efb to ram implementation is to slow for even the best systems and it's utterly pointless for games like metroid prime that don't need efb scaling. What I want the devs to do is bring back the original efb to ram implementation as an option (so you would have 4 options: disable efb, efb to texture, efb to ram, hybrid efb). What we call efb to ram now is actually a hybrid between efb to ram and efb to texture. Older builds use true efb to ram. We switched over to a hybrid method so that we could get efb scaling to work without losing the proper emulation of efb to ram, problem is some games don't need efb scaling and hybrid efb is slower than true efb to ram. The other way we could do it is eliminate the "efb scale copy" option in the enhancements tab (it's redundant since turning off efb scale and setting the scale to 1x do the same thing), and in the efb scale drop down box in the main tab chance "1x scale" to "Off". Then set it up so that true efb to ram is used instead of hybrid efb if "Off" is selected as the scale and "efb to ram" is selected as the implementation. This would accomplish the same thing without adding more options (since the devs are so concerned about that for some reason). But my basic point is simple, in some way shape or form we need to add a true efb to ram option to dolphin for games like metroid prime. Once that happens I can guarantee most of the games that you are having performance issues with now will run fullspeed. I tried to make a patch for this myself but the code for dolphin is a mess and I can't figure out what is what.
Quote:@NV: Peak hardware was what I meant doesn't exist yet. Maybe with Buldozer and Sandy Bridge we'll see some increases.
Seems logical seeing as how both are aimed towards improving performance on floating point intensive scientific applications, and dolphin is the same type of application so if they end up being what they are hyped up to be we might even see fullspeed across the board in high end dolphin setups in 1-2 years.
(09-17-2010, 01:38 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:Prime is slow
Let me guess, your using a recent revision and your using efb to ram. The new hybrid efb to ram implementation is to slow for even the best systems and it's utterly pointless for games like metroid prime that don't need efb scaling.
Try again, it's set to texture.
It's definitely not my settings, everyone I've talked to says they are good. My rigs have had a history of sucking at dolphin and excelling at everything else though.
(09-17-2010, 02:11 PM)zurginator Wrote: [ -> ] (09-17-2010, 01:38 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:Prime is slow
Let me guess, your using a recent revision and your using efb to ram. The new hybrid efb to ram implementation is to slow for even the best systems and it's utterly pointless for games like metroid prime that don't need efb scaling.
Try again, it's set to texture.
It's definitely not my settings, everyone I've talked to says they are good. My rigs have had a history of sucking at dolphin and excelling at everything else though.
What OS are you using? I got a heavy increase in stability moving from XP 32-bit to Win7 64-bit.