Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(01-18-2011, 09:28 PM)dannzen Wrote: [ -> ]

(01-18-2011, 01:02 PM)hypnotoad Wrote: [ -> ]One of these days I'll have good hardware, too. When I had money, I went all out on a Phenom II X4 970 3.50 GHz, and 2 SSDs in raid0, for a boot drive. But then, I decided to cheap out on a video card. I'm regretting that now.

why? if you dont play with 4xAA or 9xAA your video card is nearly sleeping...

i tryed it with mine... with 9xAA she runs at 30-40% load (55fps-mh3)
and with 0xAA at 2-4%load.... and still only 55fps... (mh3)

games are mostly cpu heavy...

(01-19-2011, 07:01 AM)tuanming Wrote: [ -> ]Intel CPUs are better for emulation. AMD won't get any money from me, but their GPU might be a different story.

Are you saying I just paid $170 for nothing? I just ordered a GeForce GTX 460 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
Core Clock: 725MHz
Stream Processors: 336 Processor Cores
Effective Memory Clock: 3600MHz

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127551

Should be here Thursday or Friday.

What I have now is a GeForce 210 512MB 64-bit DDR2
Core Clock: 589MHz
Stream Processors: 16
Effective Memory Clock: 800MHz

It's a $35 vid card. One of the cheapest you can get.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130536

I never imagined it's the Phenom II that can't handle this. I'm sorry guys, but I'm not convinced. When my new card gets here, I'll know for sure.

I tested it, and I guess the CPU usage was high. 50-60% When it started slowing down to like 25-50% framerate, where my guy is in fog and stuff.

But why doesn't the CPU go higher than that?

I used to have the gtx 460 768mb from MSi but today I boxed it up and ship it back to Newegg and will get something better. To me, the gtx 460 wasn't good enough for my preference, but for most people it will do. Going from a 8600gt to to gtx 460 was a huge leap, but that 768mb is not enough for today's games.

(01-19-2011, 10:05 AM)tuanming Wrote: [ -> ]I used to have the gtx 460 768mb from MSi but today I boxed it up and ship it back to Newegg and will get something better. To me, the gtx 460 wasn't good enough for my preference, but for most people it will do. Going from a 8600gt to to gtx 460 was a huge leap, but that 768mb is not enough for today's games.

This one has 1 GB. I hope it's enough. That's my budget. It's a $200 card for $150. The ones with 1280 MB are like $300.

So what are you gettin? GTX 580 1536MB 384-bit GDDR5? That's a $500 card. But if you got money....

(01-18-2011, 09:28 PM)dannzen Wrote: [ -> ]why? if you dont play with 4xAA or 9xAA your video card is nearly sleeping...
......
games are mostly cpu heavy...

You must have a good video card. I'm testing Metroid Prime. I load state at the flower boss who lays down plants with green dust that causes a slow down. I'm using the onboard GPU, ATI Radeon 4290, cause it's easier to overclock.

-- It starts at 715 Mhz. I start the game at 55% frame speed. When I get to the dust, it goes to 25-30%.
--Then I overclock it to 990 Mhz. It starts out at 80%. The dust only takes it down to 45-50%.
--Then I go down 400 Mhz. Starts out at 40%, The dust slows it to about 15%.

This is what makes me think the vid card makes a difference.

But I wonder, does Intel CPU also run at about 50-60% load?

---

Oh, and I don't have any Anti-Aliasing. I tried setting it to 4x and it slowed it way down, starting the game at about 16% speed.

Also, lowering the desktop resolution from 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 720 helped some.

Quote:Going from a 8600gt to to gtx 460 was a huge leap, but that 768mb is not enough for today's games.

The 1GB edition of the 460 is significantly faster due to it's extra ROPs (32 instead of 24), not the extra vdram. With the exception of GTAIV I have yet to see a pc game that can eat 768MB of vdram at a resolution of 1920 x 1200 or lower. Even the mighty crysis never gets above 500MB vdram usage at 1920 x 1200.

Quote:This one has 1 GB. I hope it's enough. That's my budget. It's a $200 card for $150. The ones with 1280 MB are like $300.

So what are you gettin? GTX 580 1536MB 384-bit GDDR5? That's a $500 card. But if you got money....

Throughput is more important. vdram capacity rarely matters unless you have a multi-monitor setup.

Quote:Oh, and I don't have any Anti-Aliasing. I tried setting it to 4x and it slowed it way down, starting the game at about 16% speed.

Also, lowering the desktop resolution from 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 720 helped some.

Turn off efb scaled copy.

Quote:But why doesn't the CPU go higher than that?

Because dolphin is a dual threaded application and you have a quad core cpu.

(01-19-2011, 12:22 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Oh, and I don't have any Anti-Aliasing. I tried setting it to 4x and it slowed it way down, starting the game at about 16% speed.

Also, lowering the desktop resolution from 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 720 helped some.

Turn off efb scaled copy.

I tested it, and I can't tell the difference. You know, there should be some printout file somewhere, that keeps track of the frame speed, and averages them out, so you can do the same run 10 times with one setting and 10 times again with the other setting, and see which setting has the best average. That would be very useful for testing.

I could make one in autoit.

(01-19-2011, 12:22 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:But why doesn't the CPU go higher than that?

Because dolphin is a dual threaded application and you have a quad core cpu.

How does that work? It's taking up CPU on all 4 cores.


And it's always the same, no matter how laggy the game gets. You'd think if it were the CPU, it would go all the way to the top, on at least 2 of the cores. And it never does.

So all this leads me to believe that it's the GPU. It's just not good enough. I overclocked it, and that helped considerably. Now, there are more times where the framerate is at 100%. Times that where like 85%+ are now 100%. Times that where 45% are now 60%. Or something like that. I don't know exactly.

(01-19-2011, 10:15 PM)hypnotoad Wrote: [ -> ]So all this leads me to believe that it's the GPU. It's just not good enough. I overclocked it, and that helped considerably. Now, there are more times where the framerate is at 100%. Times that where like 85%+ are now 100%. Times that where 45% are now 60%. Or something like that. I don't know exactly.

At first activate 'lock threads to core'. Then the threads aren't scheduled by the OS, they are fixed on two cores. Then you really see the load it is doing

Could you spare some of those extra FPS? they'd surely help.

Regarding the core usage, keep in mind the GPU might add some load to the other cores, since AFAIK, NVidia GPUs have the option for multi-threaded optimization.

I really never trust the Windows core usage anyway. I could program a simple single-core app that uses the CPU at full speed, and it'll report that there's half usage in each core.

Quote:I tested it, and I can't tell the difference. You know, there should be some printout file somewhere, that keeps track of the frame speed, and averages them out, so you can do the same run 10 times with one setting and 10 times again with the other setting, and see which setting has the best average. That would be very useful for testing.

I could make one in autoit.

Or you could use fraps and use fps logging.

Quote:How does that work? It's taking up CPU on all 4 cores.

Quote:And it's always the same, no matter how laggy the game gets. You'd think if it were the CPU, it would go all the way to the top, on at least 2 of the cores. And it never does.

If lock threads to cores is off (it's an option in the main dolphin config) the OS assigns thread affinity. The affinity (which core the thread is running on) changes every few nanoseconds. The threads are essentially "jumping" from core to core. Task manager gives you an average level of activity over a period of 1-2 seconds for each cores every time it updates. Since it doesn't poll for activity level as fast as the threads switch you see about 50% load on each core instead of 100 - 0 - 100 - 0 - 100 - 0 constantly changing. Then again if it updated fast enough to show you what was really happing it would be so fast you wouldn't even be able to see it. If you turn on lock threads to cores the application sets thread affinity manually, locking the threads to two specific cores so that they can't "escape".

Quote:I really never trust the Windows core usage anyway. I could program a simple single-core app that uses the CPU at full speed, and it'll report that there's half usage in each core.

That's because it's accurate. The thread affinity is changing every few nanoseconds and task manager gives you an average level of activity over a 1-2 second period.

Quote:Regarding the core usage, keep in mind the GPU might add some load to the other cores, since AFAIK, NVidia GPUs have the option for multi-threaded optimization.

No it doesn't. The d3d/opengl runtime compiler run on the same thread as the gpu/dsp emulators. They use very little cpu load compared to the other things dolphin does. And multi-threaded compiling of d3d code is only available on d3d11 hardware (and dolphin doesn't use it).

Quote:So all this leads me to believe that it's the GPU. It's just not good enough. I overclocked it, and that helped considerably. Now, there are more times where the framerate is at 100%. Times that where like 85%+ are now 100%. Times that where 45% are now 60%. Or something like that. I don't know exactly.

Could you please make a new thread in the support section of the forum to ask these kinds of questions? This really isn't the place and since I don't have an OP from you with your specs and settings this is beginning to get confusing as well.

Yep, sure enough.


My brother's Semperon 140 couldn't even handle it. CPU usage was stuck 100%, the game was completely unplayable. About 5% speed.

I had to switch back to the geforce 210, because some glitch caused the screen to be tinted red. It turns out, the Radeon 4290, that came with the motherboard, was better... while it lasted, anyway.

But the Invidia software confirmed my suspicion that my GPU was getting maxed out.





That's overclocking. Default is 589.

Well yeah a G210 is pretty weak. What did you expect?

Some graphically heavy games need a 9500gt/GT220/8600GTS/7900GT/radeon 5550/radeon 4670/and so on... just to run at native resolution without bottlenecking the cpu.