Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So I just bought my girlfriend a new rig, we wanted a cheap one because she wouldn't use it to play many modern games, etc.
It seems the Phenom II X4 @ 3,2 GHZ isn't enough for dolphin.
For muramasa the demon blade it works like a charm (constant fullspeed with frameskeep at 1) but when trying to play zelda the wind waker it works almost as fast as my Athlon II X2 @ 2.3 Ghz laptop.
May this be because of the rig using nothing but integrated graphics?
These are the specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.2Ghz on an AM3 socket.
2GB DDR3 ram @ 1333Ghz
Integrated Geforce 7025
Windows 7 32bits
I'm guessing the bottleneck here might be the Integrated graphics and we're thinking about upgrading to something not too expensive so she can play some games on this PC, because this phenom seems kind of overkill for the rest of the PC.
Is this really the case? Should I Upgrade to Win X64 even with only 2 gigs of ram? If I were to buy a dedicated graphics card what should I look for? What is popular over here and not too overpriced? What featurse should I look for in a graphics card for dolphin or emulation in general?

Quote:May this be because of the rig using nothing but integrated graphics?

Yes. Buy a graphics card. A 7025i is complete garbage as far as dolphin is concerned.

Quote:Should I Upgrade to Win X64 even with only 2 gigs of ram?

Yes but if you don't have the money don't sweat it, it won't make THAT much of a difference.

Quote:If I were to buy a dedicated graphics card what should I look for? What is popular over here and not too overpriced? What featurse should I look for in a graphics card for dolphin or emulation in general?

You need to give us a budget before we can make any recommendations.

My 955 is running at 4.0 GHz and that's still not enough for certain parts of certain games. But yes, I'd say your graphics card is the bigger issue here - even something like a Radeon HD5570 would be a big boost.

(11-02-2011, 09:49 PM)SeeK Wrote: [ -> ]My 955 is running at 4.0 GHz and that's still not enough for certain parts of certain games. But yes, I'd say your graphics card is the bigger issue here - even something like a Radeon HD5570 would be a big boost.

I guess a radeon HD5570 would be cool enough. So graphic cards are important at all?

Whatever speed you get with 1xNative IR, that's the same speed you're going to have with a new video card, only you can raise your IR and make it look better without losing speed.

Because of the lack of an edit button:
The budget would be arround 100 dollars top, she's not any sort of hardcore crysis 10 gamer haha.

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What do you mean 1xNative IR?
So the card won't get zelda the wind waker out of that 70%? That's weird as I saw people playing it at max speed with way worse processors :S

(11-03-2011, 02:32 AM)[SS] Starscream Wrote: [ -> ]Whatever speed you get with 1xNative IR, that's the same speed you're going to have with a new video card, only you can raise your IR and make it look better without losing speed.

That's not true [SS] if he lowers the IR he will get better speed.

(11-03-2011, 03:59 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: [ -> ]

(11-03-2011, 02:32 AM)[SS] Starscream Wrote: [ -> ]Whatever speed you get with 1xNative IR, that's the same speed you're going to have with a new video card, only you can raise your IR and make it look better without losing speed.

That's not true [SS] if he lowers the IR he will get better speed.

I guess you don't understand the concept of a bottleneck.

If he lowers the IR now to 1x, his GPU is not is not going to bottleneck his processor and he will get the speed his CPU is fully capable of. Adding a better video card is going to allow him to raise his IR without losing speed, but his processor is still going to run the game at the same speed.

But then again isn't my 955 enough to play wind waker at fullspeed? I'm reaching roughly 70% as of right now.

Post your Dolphin settings.