hello this is my first post on the forums.
i've been trying to get Super Mario Galaxy and SMG2 to work full speeds for a couple days now and i had a question.
here are my specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 820 2.8Ghz
6Gb ddr2
Windows 7 x64
ATI Radeon HD 5450 512mb gddr3
i was curious to know, i have a ati radeon hd 4650 1gb card, would that give me the boost in performance i need?
im running rsvn6274 ssse3 build
i've tried the sse3 build in both x86 and x64, and no increase.
my running fps goes between 38 - 61 the main area(space ship area) runs around 38.
Quote:i was curious to know, i have a ati radeon hd 4650 1gb card, would that give me the boost in performance i need?
Only if you are not running at 640 x 480 or you are using AA. Your cpu would still bottleneck you even with a better video card but a better video card would allow you to run at a higher resolution and use AA without incuring a massive performance penalty.
so in essence... my cpu is what is holding me back?
is it because its not an intel platform?
Quote:is it because its not an intel platform?
Although having an i3/i5 would help a lot it still wouldn't run full speed all the time. SMG and SMG2 are very cpu intensive games that are simply difficult to achieve fullspeed with.
Quote:so in essence... my cpu is what is holding me back?
Technically both of them are holding you back. It's just that if you use 640 x 480 with SSAA off you can get away with having a 5450 (barely). You might gain some improvement with a 4650 but unless you're running at a higher resolution I doubt it will be a significant improvement. I just wanted to point out that no matter how good you're video card is you still won't get fullspeed, that's why I said that.
Okay that makes sense seeing as I can play nsmbw and Mario kart wii flawlessly.
do you think the builds will ever open up more to amd for optimization?
Cause I know I don't have a crap cpu, dolphin just favors Intel because of the
special Intel c++ compiler
Quote:Cause I know I don't have a crap cpu, dolphin just favors Intel because of the
special Intel c++ compiler
It has nothing to do with that. People have been making that claim for years but no one has been able to prove it. In fact the amd fanbase blamed phenoms (the original not phenom II) crappy performance on that. It was only after amd fixed the real problem in phenom II that the amd fanbase admitted it was the hardware architecture that was to blame for crappy sse3 performance. In my personal opinion ICC barely favors intel cpus if at all. Dolphin like most programs can be compiled with many different compilers, some of which do not check the cpu identifier number and therefore could not possible discriminate against amd cpus. If you compare other compilers to ICC you will see what I'm talking about, ICC doesn't discriminate as much as the amd fanbase would lead you to believe. And if you are worried about that just get one of the builds that isn't compiled with ICC like mamarios builds.
No the reason that an i3/i5 would outperform your 820 is due to a combination of a higher clock rate, dynamic cache allocation, larger cache, and better IMC. Simply put it's better hardware.
If you need proof that what I am saying is true simply compare a core 2 quad with similar specs (clock rate and cache size) against a phenom II like the one in your system. You will see that performance per clock is only slightly higher (5%) for a cpu with slightly more cache, thus proving that dolphin does not discriminate against amd in any way and neither do the compilers. Then try it with an i3/i5. You will notice a large increase in performance if you are using efb to ram but if you lower the IMC and ram frequency you will notice a linear drop in performance follows. Thus proving that what I said about the advantages in hardware are true.
You don't have a crap cpu it's just that certain games are REALLY demanding. So demanding that almost no one can run them at fullspeed while using settings that provide good emulation.
okay that was very well said and I appreciate you being unbias in your explaination.
I mearly read about the icc and nothing more(I am quite uneducated with dolphin) I tried it in my brother's i5 750 and smg was flawless.
It also read as having 16 cores. I figure ill switch out my gpu with the better one, and be happy it plays at what it does now.
Your cpu is still quite good, it's just not top tier. But then again how many of us have top tier hardware anyways?
haha excellent point! the people who have that money to spend!
more power too them lol
I read your cig and became curious, what is a Q6600?
i was going to google it, but i figured you'd be able to describe it in better detail.
Quote:I read your cig and became curious, what is a Q6600?
It's the model.
Core 2 Quad Kentsfield (65nm + sse3) 2.4GHz 1066MHz FSB 8MB L2 cache.
When I bought it back in 2007 it was the only desktop quad core cpu below $300. Still one of the most popular cpus to this day.
6600 is the model number. And then intel uses a letter prefix depending on what type of cpu it is.
Q = quad core, core 2
E = dual core, core 2 (though some of them are called pentium D or celeron)
Next model up at the time was the Q6700. Which was 2.66Ghz instead of 2.4GHz and had a 12MB L2 cache instead of 8MB. At the time it cost twice as much as the Q6600 ($270 for the Q6600 and $600 for the Q6700).
Your cpu model is 820. And the series is phenom II. So it's model #820 in the phenom II series and refers to a specific configuration of the phenom II chip (the chip is called deneb, and in your case it is set to run at 2.8GHz with 1/4 of the L3 cache disabled).