Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(05-09-2011, 08:49 AM)gore Wrote: [ -> ]Imo, if someone would ever port it, he should make use of all 8 cores, not 2 like in pc version

You do realize that there are actual reasons (apart from laziness) why we don't make use of more than 3 cores in Dolphin, right?

Quote:The PS3 is a beast of a machine.

Keep telling yourself that. The day the cell BE doesn't suck at branch prediction will be the day it becomes decent for conventional programming.

Quote:Imo, if someone would ever port it, he should make use of all 8 cores, not 2 Wink like in pc version

The cell BE doesn't have 8 cores. It has one core with 8 SPEs, WHICH IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT!

Quote:Nolonar, that's an interesting idea......it's ridiculous, I know, but I wonder how the Wii would handle emulating itself.

That's impossible because then it wouldn't be emulation. That would be the equivalent of trying to imitate yourself. If you did do that you would just be acting like you, which means you wouldn't be doing anything at all. So technically the wii does emulate itself, perfectly.

Quote:That's impossible because then it wouldn't be emulation. That would be the equivalent of trying to imitate yourself. If you did do that you would just be acting like you, which means you wouldn't be doing anything at all. So technically the wii does emulate itself, perfectly.

I understand what you're saying. It's impossible, but the idea was funny for a moment.....the first impression that came to my head was upscaling the internal resolution of the Wii....but I guess you don't need to emulate itself to do that.

The PS3 might be a biatch to code on but if you can do it properly, it's a powerhouse. Dolphin could run perfect on it and the up-scaling would be awesome!; not to mention the intended project of porting PCSX2 and NullDC on the PS3 as well.....but that's straying off-topic.

Quote:You do realize that there are actual reasons (apart from laziness) why we don't make use of more than 3 cores in Dolphin, right?

It's a bit of a n00bish question but will utilizing more cores be overkill/redundant for Dolphin?

r2rX

Quote:It's impossible, but the idea was funny for a moment.....the first impression that came to my head was upscaling the internal resolution of the Wii....but I guess you don't need to emulate itself to do that.

Impossible was a bad word to use. "Makes no f*cking sense" would be a better description. It shows that the person does not understand what the word emulation means.

Quote:The PS3 might be a biatch to code on but if you can do it properly, it's a powerhouse. Dolphin could run perfect on it and the up-scaling would be awesome!

No it's not. The Cell BE is good for highly parallel vector code, something that dolphin doesn't need. The Cell BE is also terrible at branch prediction, scalar math, and prefetching, things that dolphin relies heavily on from what I can tell. One advantage I can think of is the Cell BEs ridiculous memory bandwidth/latency and cache coherency would allow for good efb emulation. But overall the PS3 would be a shitty platform for dolphin compared to x86 platforms. The shitty G77 GPU might actually require low level gpu programming just to attain tolerable performance in something like dolphin that requires enormous amounts of shader code to be run to emulate the fixed functions of the GC/Wiis GPU.

Please do not let the sony fanboys saying "omgz the PS3 is a supercomputer!" get to you. The Cell BE is good for some applications, mainly scientific and API-less visual applications. But it is not good for all applications.

Also dolphin already does linear upscaling. Any difference in upscaling quality would likely be unnoticeable.

The PS3s hardware is a lot more similar to the GC/Wiis hardware so emulation of the core components might be a lot easier but performance would still be a serious issue that I'm willing to bet could not be resolved because unlike a PC the PS3 doesn't get any faster as new hardware comes out.

(05-09-2011, 06:13 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: [ -> ]Then he won't have SP1 -.-

why shouldn he have sp1?

the loaders work with prepatched SP1 Versions... just google it


why should someone mention sp1?

(05-09-2011, 11:03 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Impossible was a bad word to use. "Makes no f*cking sense" would be a better description. It shows that the person does not understand what the word emulation means.

It was just a joke, I thought the smilie I used was enough to show, that I wasn't being serious.
Sorry about the misunderstanding...

(05-09-2011, 08:49 AM)gore Wrote: [ -> ]Imo, if someone would ever port it, he should make use of all 8 cores, not 2 like in pc version

To be honest, using all Cores of a system isn't difficult.
What's difficult is to use them in a way that makes sense.

In order to parallelize a program, you need to define which parts of the code will need to run on a separate thread.
It would be easy to put each and every command into a separate thread, but there's no sense in doing it, because:

1. Some commands require the results of previous commands in order to execute correctly. You'll need for those to finish first, before you can continue.
2. The more threads you have, the more "program pointers" need to be managed, which may slow down your system a lot.
3. If you multithread small codes, like (1+2) + (3+4), you might save a few nanoseconds, but in order to create a new thread and a new stack for the thread, you'll spend several milliseconds, resulting in a slowdown.
4. Not to mention all shared variables, that might need to be accessed accross multiple threads. You'll need to protect them accordingly to prevent "race conditions" or "inconsistent" (corrupt) results, while making sure that you never enter a "deadlock" or let your thread "starve".
   

These are the reasons, why you can't parallelise an emulated program, that isn't natively parallelized (Wii games are such programs, since the Wii only has 1 core)

Dolphin, PS3???

I'm outta here

(05-09-2011, 11:03 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Please do not let the sony fanboys saying "omgz the PS3 is a supercomputer!" get to you. The Cell BE is good for some applications, mainly scientific and API-less visual applications. But it is not good for all applications.

You not saying that im fan boy do you? I dont even have ps3 O_o

Im just saying which is true that PS3 is used to US Army cluster, and was used to crack SSL O_o, which was pretty impressive even for supercomputers.

Im telling which is true, that PS3 is great unit for cluster in terms of COST/PERFORMANCE.
Go google it if you don't believe

And give me proof for PS3 not being the most powerfull console NOW available on market.

r2rX Wrote:NullDC

Thanks didnt know that i will look on it

(05-10-2011, 05:44 AM)gore Wrote: [ -> ]Im telling which is true, that PS3 is great unit for cluster in terms of COST/PERFORMANCE.
Go google it if you don't believe

if you get a ps3 with linux

*ekhem* theres a DUAL BOOT with OtherOS (linux) for slim/fat ps3. So no problem with linux