Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I've read about fps and vps, only one quick question, that means that if I get fps=vps all the time on a game but not in fullspeeed I have enough video but lack in cpu? is this correct?

What you mean enough video? You mean display card not powerful enough?
Both CPU and display card will affect the FPS.
But dolphin use more CPU than a display card.
Which means if you are not setting a very high resolution or using very high SSAA.
A standalone display card should be enough to handle the graphic rendering.
VPS should be always synchronize with FPS in the newest revision.
So, FPS=VPS is most likely your FPS can't run as fullspeed and also slowdown the VPS.

Video=video card power
Okay, but still, this means that, considering my current GPU, if I had to choose between upgrading CPU or GPU I should upgrade CPU, right?
Also, this means that there is something must be wrong with the frameskip, cause whenever I turn it on the fps gets down while the vps stays stable, and the game speed dont improve at all, just become more choppy. But this could means instead that Im making some mistake lol

Thanks for the answer

Quote:if I had to choose between upgrading CPU or GPU I should upgrade CPU, right?

For the love of god CPU! You desperately need a better cpu. A 9500GT is fine as long as you stay away from SSAA and don't crank up your resolution to above 1366 x 768 (depending on the game of course).

Quote:that means that if I get fps=vps all the time on a game but not in fullspeeed I have enough video but lack in cpu? is this correct?

Not necessarily.

hmmm thanks, I never use antialias and I use to play in 1024x768, and I use the emu mainly GC games, as my GameCube is not reading disks anymore XD
And you're probably right, Im impressed myself with what I get with this CPU Lol, for PC games, even newer ones, like GTA IV and etc, it's just fine, but dolphin needs a little more, although there are various games that run fullspeed all the time (considering only the ones where it can be done, of course)

My motherBoard doest support quad cores, and I dont even think it's worth it for dolphin, so a 3.0 Ghz Dual Core could do it?

Can you upgrade to a Phenom II 550? or a 720?

It depends on the socket, my mobo have AM2 socket, so it should run with socket AM2 and AM2+ CPUs, what still holds me on Phenom 1 CPUs and dont support Athlon II, but I heard that AM3 CPUs have backwards compatibility to run on AM2+ and AM2 socket mobos, if that's true than I can upgrade to whatever I want, as long as it be from AMD and my wallet can pay for it
As far as I know am3 is the newest AMD socket so far. Still, It would have to be 2 cores maximun, Im pretty sure of that, but I will check it out.

Thanks again for the help

EDIT: seems like I was wrong, I can use more than 2 cores on my motherboard, thats weird, I aways thought the core number was directly dependant on the socket. Wow, this whole socket thing seems to be much less restrictive than I thought
So, in that case yes, I can get Phenom II 550 or 720, it's the best option? I was personally thinking in the 550, seems good, and even now that I know I can have more than 2 cores, multi cores is still so much expensive here XD

720 is a better choice. Only slightly more expensive than a 550 and having a third core to run background tasks on will help more than you might think. However I should point out that since dolphin is heavily bottlenecked by memory bandwidth without upgrading to a socket AM3 board and ddr3 ram you can't expect amazing performance. Many games will still experience major slowdowns, especially with efb to ram.

Are you sure that the DDR3 thing really improves Dolphin speed while using EFB to RAM ?
I used to think that DDR3 was only a very little improvement on DDR2, since in most of memory benches there isn't much difference between "good" DDR2 and DDR3.

(10-10-2010, 08:08 PM)DarzgL Wrote: [ -> ]Are you sure that the DDR3 thing really improves Dolphin speed while using EFB to RAM ?
I used to think that DDR3 was only a very little improvement on DDR2, since in most of memory benches there isn't much difference between "good" DDR2 and DDR3.

He is right, as far as I know ddr3 is much faster than ddr2, and dolphin does need memory bandwidth as high as possible...