Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello.

I just installed a new GeForce GTS 250 on my gaming maching last night. The old card is a GeForce 8500 GT. I had benchmarked the old card on Dolphin, PCSX2 and Demul, the previous night, expecting to see a boost in performance. I then played the exact same games with the exact same settings, and the results with the new card were... you guessed it... exactly the same.

I did install the latest drivers from nVidia and, as a sanity check, I played Street Fighter IV PC version with the highest possible settings. It played beatifully without any slowdowns, whereas my old card could not handle anything above 640x480 and minimal quality settings.

I am familiar with emulators, so I know CPU is the biggest contributor to performance, but, unlike MAME, Dolphin does use shaders, so I was expecting my crappy 8500 GT to be a limiting factor. As it turns out, it isn't. This makes me think that GPU requirements for Dolphin and the other emulators I tried, are much lower than what some people in the forums tend to believe.
Could I be missing something?

This emulator is still in its early stages it seems. While being mature enough to play many games it doesnt nessesarly seem to handle all video card properly. It looks mostly to rely on cpu power. Hopefully over time optimization should solve these issues.

It could be your CPU is just bottlenecking much harder than the card, perhaps with a better CPU the old card would have bottlenecked you.

It needs proper balance of power as an emulator both for the cpu and gpu. Probably your cpu is weak compared to your gpu, if any of the two is weak for a game it will drag performance down to it's pace, and therefore you will not notice any difference.

The CPU is an E1200 1.6GHz, overclocked to 2.7GHz.
I'm convinced that having a faster one would inrease performance, just from a CPU usage standpoint. However, I struggle with my CPU being so much of a bottleneck as to not let the GPU make a difference, when I see how much better I was able to run SFIV with the new card and the same CPU.

I'm seriously considering just returning it, as I don't know a lot of PC gaming (SFIV excepted).

(04-26-2011, 12:24 AM)themanuel Wrote: [ -> ]The CPU is an [color=#FF0000]E1200[/color] 1.6GHz, overclocked to 2.7GHz.

thats a celeron
thats not good
thats not good at all

Edit: thats REALLY not good at all

(04-26-2011, 12:50 AM)silveruniverse Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-26-2011, 12:24 AM)themanuel Wrote: [ -> ]The CPU is an [color=#FF0000]E1200[/color] 1.6GHz, overclocked to 2.7GHz.

thats a celeron
thats not good
thats not good at all

Edit: thats REALLY not good at all

You are taking it a bit too far.
The only difference between my arcade machine and my home computer is the L2 cache (1MB on the Celeron, 2MB on the other one). The only comparison I've made is with MAME, but running same version/game/parameters, I get 7% better framerate on the machine with 2MB cache. That's not enough of a difference for twice the cache, to dismiss Celeron as a viable cheap alternative. You might be stuck in the pre-dual core days, where Celeron developed its bad reputation.

true. my 1st computer was a P4 1.5GHz, was 1999-2000 and the celerons back then were not worth the price for the performance. i still assume they arent any different now.

regardless id still say the clock speed should be a bit faster, although i dont know what games you play that will need it

(04-26-2011, 02:07 AM)silveruniverse Wrote: [ -> ]regardless id still say the clock speed should be a bit faster, although i dont know what games you play that will need it

Definitely. My CPU speed is my biggest roadblock now. I was thinking the video card would help with Doplhin, but now I'm considering returning the GTS 250 and buying faster processor instead. I don't want to spend money on something that will not make a difference.

definately return it if you dont need it, but i would say to get a new graphics card soon. the stats are pretty low on passmark

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+8500+GT