Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

The following thread is a work in progress designed to inform people about the video card requirements of dolphin. I am making this with the intent of having it become a sticky upon completion. Please refrain from posting in this thread until I have stated its completion. And don't worry, I will clean this up and make it more "noob friendly" before I'm done, I know how they hate reading long posts. A cpu requirements thread will be made soon as well. The other requirements threads will be extremely short compared to this one. I'm underlined things to help people skim through and read the important stuff faster.


The first thing you need to understand about the video card requirements of dolphin is that it varies a lot from one game to another, one operating system to another, one backend to another, and from one configuration of settings to another.

You must also take into account cpu bottlenecks. That is, if your cpu is too slow it will bottleneck the video card, and vice versa. If your cpu is bottlenecking your video card you must either adjust your settings or buy a better cpu. Buying a better video card won't help you if the cpu is bottlenecking your current video card. Later on in this thread I will discuss how to identify whether your cpu is bottlenecking your video card or not.

Because of these simple facts the only way that I can provide you with some idea as to what video card you should have is to assume that your cpu is not bottlenecking your video card and provide you with an AVERAGE video card requirement for more demanding games for each combination of settings. So keep in mind that the video card requirements are not the same for every game, what you see below is merely the the average for most of the more demanding games.

Having a more powerful video card will allow you to raise your graphics settings higher without reducing performance.








Dual gpu cards, mobile gpus, professional graphics cards (quadro series, etc.), integrated GPUs, apus, and very old graphics cards are not included for now.

Additional data: http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=14201
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2011-gaming-graphics-charts/benchmarks,123.html

Quick question, how do I tell if my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU?

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Also, what's the use of having 3x internal resolution if your monitor doesn't support it? Could you just set it to fractional so that it automatically fits the window size, then put the game in full screen. Would that automatically give the best image quality possible?

(08-09-2011, 06:22 AM)dmeagher101 Wrote: [ -> ]Quick question, how do I tell if my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU?

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Also, what's the use of having 3x internal resolution if your monitor doesn't support it? Could you just set it to fractional so that it automatically fits the window size, then put the game in full screen. Would that automatically give the best image quality possible?

In this emulator, it is almost assuredly a processor bottleneck most of the time unless you're doing like SSAA with 2x+ resolutions or have a bestbuy off the shelf computer with like an i7 and a 5450 graphics card lol. It's definitely not going to be common like it is with regular pc games, but a quick ask and answer is probably sufficient to learn that.

The higher the resolutions will actually give better image qualities though once you hit your window/fullscreen res anyway you'll definitely see diminishing returns. As working AA ideas for dx9 are getting kicked around, I find 4x native resolution a decent bandage that lessens aliasing even though my tv is only 1920x1080. The downsampling helps though I've read the downsampling advantage might not be as severe as it is in regular pc games. Though I'm not specifically sure why he's calling out 3x rather than auto window size/fractional.

Oh maybe I jumped the gun in responding if you aren't done yet..delete if you need to.

Quote:Please refrain from posting in this thread until I have stated its completion.

Thank you everyone who listened!

I'm not going to delete your post since I want him to have a chance to see the answer to his question. What I'm going to do is simply delete all but the first post in the thread when I'm done with the OP.

By the way neobrain (the developer who made the d3d11 plugin and does a lot of work on the other two as well) is planning to eventually replace the internal resolution option with additional SSAA shaders after someone figures out what's wrong with the current SSAA shaders.

I don't have a lot of time to work on this but I should still be able to get the OP done by the end of the week. The biggest problem has actually been the lack of credible data to use when constructing the chart. I've been using some tomshardware benchmarks (they have charts that show the average results of all of their benchmarks) but looking back at it, a lot of the data doesn't match up. For example the 8800GT is averaging double an 8600GT despite the fact that I know an 8800GT has 3.5x the number of stream processors running at a 50% higher clock rate. Which means it should have 4.75x the shader throughput (in addition to having twice the memory capacity and 4.25x the memory bandwidth). I remember a few years ago I upgraded from a 7900GS, which at the time was on par with an 8600GT, to an 8800GT and I watched the performance of all of my games go up 3x-4x. I'm trying to use my own video card as a reference point (my GTX C216 can manage about a 6.0MP internal resolution at the most which maintaining fullspeed in the more intense games). We also have some credible data from our own forum benchmark but it doesn't cover enough video cards.

I'm able to get fullspeed with Wind Waker on 9xSSAA and 3xInternal.....

Isn't Wind Waker a demanding game !?

Depends on the spot. If you're able to do that on the outside area of the forsaken fortress without any slowdowns THEN I'm impressed. You have an overclocked GTX 580 so you might be able to pull it off, but that's literally the only card I can think of that might be able to pull that off.

I want to be as conservative as possible with my estimates so that nobody says "but you said it would run fine!". So I'm going for the absolute most demanding situation.

What do you mean with outside ?

Do you when travelling with the boot to there, or when getting shoot by the canon ´?

He means the first time when you're circling up the Fortress to get to the top and pass by the Moblin. That part has massive slowdowns because of the graphics.

Don't higher resolutions require a larger framebuffer. Won't a 580 choke at higher resolutions + SSAA faster than something with 2gb ram like my 6970 (just wondering, not biased or anything because I own the card lol)

I never tried anything as high as 3x res + 9xssaa. I guess I'll give it a shot with my new gpu.

Quote:Don't higher resolutions require a larger framebuffer. Won't a 580 choke at higher resolutions + SSAA faster than something with 2gb ram like my 6970 (just wondering, not biased or anything because I own the card lol)

Higher internal resolution = larger framebuffer, that's literally what it means, so yes.

And yes it does increase vdram usage but dolphin requires so little vdram to begin with that even a card with 1GB would have more than enough vdram to handle the higher settings. You'll run out of shader throughput way before you run out of vdram. So shader throughput is usually more important.

We don't have a lot of data on the new 6000 series cards being used with dolphin but the data we do have so far seems to point to the GTX 580 being significantly faster at a high internal resolution (though a 6970 should still be able to handle very high internal resolutions easily with most games).

Quote:He means the first time when you're circling up the Fortress to get to the top and pass by the Moblin. That part has massive slowdowns because of the graphics.

^Bingo. That's exactly what I meant. Big areas like that require a lot of geometry to be rendered when you look out at the whole area.