Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

It's going to be very expensive and probably only have marginal speed improvements in a laptop. You can probably get your choice of any i7 at a very reasonable price by then. That's what I'm looking to do.

(07-14-2011, 12:35 AM)RoundSparrow Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-08-2011, 09:15 AM)JaredHedgehog Wrote: [ -> ]Dolphin 3.0, LOL. I recommend you use the SVN revisions, since 3.0 has serious speed problems due to accurate hardware emulation. I have r7589 (Mamario's builds) x64 bit and it does wonders on both of my desktops. .

The SVN builds past version 3.0 are 10% to 20% slower on Wii Sports Bowling and Punch Out!. The FPS just is poor with no improvement in emulation. This is on i7 2.2Ghz laptop. The Dolphin textcache-rewrite may be better at emulation on some games, but not the ones I try that max out my system.

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A couple updates. I've got my Dell E6520 for a few days. Dolphin runs far better on this system on Windows 7, despite the GPU being a pretty pathetic one (NVS 4200M). Perhaps Nvidia drivers are far better suited to DirectX11 on Dolphin than the ATI 11.6 drivers on 6770M? The CPU speed alone doesn't account for the difference, as I tried both systems using the Intel graphics chip and 2.0Ghz vs. 2.2Ghz i7 wasn't more than expected.

One really interesting observation I have found about Dolphin on an i5 / i7 laptop! The Dell E6520 BIOS is pretty decent, it allows you to set 1, 2, or 4 cores! I turned on only 2 cores [confirmed by Windows 7 Task Manager] wanting to see if the Intel Turbo would work better (3.1Ghz on dual core vs 2.9Ghz with quad)! THE PUNCH LINE: Dolphin runs better on quadcore than dual-core using the same CPU speeds! Dolphin performed significantly faster in terms of FPS in Wii Sports Bowling and Punch Out! games. MY THEORY: The 3rd core is being used heavily by the Nvidia GPU driver software! I had not previously considered this and had assumed a faster dual-core system would be preference over a slower quad-core system. With the thermal limits in a laptop, it's a complex puzzle.

Learning, learning

Good one! I'm looking for a good laptop for Dolphin + Blender and flash and other stuff, and it seems that the i7 is a clear winner here. I wonder if the other Nvidia chipsets (geforce 520m and up) would use the 3rd core like you said. That would then bring a HUGE kick to regular PC games as well, am I correct?

(07-16-2011, 06:18 AM)JaredHedgehog Wrote: [ -> ]Good one! I'm looking for a good laptop for Dolphin + Blender and flash and other stuff, and it seems that the i7 is a clear winner here. I wonder if the other Nvidia chipsets (geforce 520m and up) would use the 3rd core like you said. That would then bring a HUGE kick to regular PC games as well, am I correct?

I can keep it very simple.... if you can afford the extra money, I have found ZERO disadvantage to having same-clock CPU quad over dual (on mobile CPU). The turbo feature of the i7 quad works so well that it has no disadvantage over a dual-core. The i7-2620M 2.7Ghz is bested in Dolphin by the 2.0Ghz quad 2620qm in my testing (the turbo feature really works, and delivers 2.8Ghz). It's just a price increase... $75 well spent in most cases.

I apologize for bringing this topic back up. However, the things I'm going to say may help some users speed up Dolphin on their Sandy Bridge laptops.

Today Dell released an update for my laptop (Vostro 3450), and using this update I was able to toggle manual GPU switching on.
Apart from getting back OpenGL functionality, this gave me a HUGE performance boost in Dolphin, even Sonic Colors is working really well. I didn't have time to test it very thoroughly, but I've NEVER seen FPS drop below 40 (fullspeed in this game is 30), even in those areas where it used to drop to 18-25 when I had an old version of the BIOS.

The bottomline is: if you have a laptop with so-called muxless switchable graphics, make sure you can enable manual switching using BIOS or manufacturer's drivers. In some laptops (like Dell Vostro 3x50 series or HP dv6) this option was initially not available, but due to a great number of complaints they released updates.

I will test some more games if you're interested.

I have this laptop but it only has the HD3000 (no discrete GPU),
will Dolphin run decently on this?, and are there any good HD3000 drivers yet?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+14%22+Laptop+-+8GB+Memory+-+750GB+Hard+Drive+-+Aluminum+Platinum/4566459.p?id=1218492325284&skuId=4566459

With that GPU, set the internal resolution to 1x and do not use any AA, the rest is up to your processor and other settings.

Thanks!