Sorry to hijack the thread but I too would like some advice.
I have an C2D E8400 3GHz overclocked to a rock solid stable 4GHz with 4GB of RAM and an HD4850 512MB.
I've been running Dolphin r7719M x64 recommended settings and I'm having no crashing issues and everything runs very well at 30fps apart from anywhere that has large open areas such as Skyloft when it can drop to as low as 19fps.
I tried to isolate the problem by setting my CPU to stock speed to see if it had a noticeable difference in my framerate but we are talking 1 or 2 frames.
I then clocked my CPU to 3.6GHz and found that I was getting the same performance as I am from 4.0GHz which lead me to believe that the CPU isn't the limiting factor.
I've been very happy running at 1680x1050 at 2x scaling, no AA and 16x AF aside from this framerate dip so I reduced the resolution to native, scaling to native, no AA and 1x AF but I get exactly the same framerate.
Long story short, is everyone seeing this dip in framerate in Skyloft or would upgrading to a 2500k system completely eradicate any dips in framerate?
I appreciate that it would probably allow me to get similiar performance with LLE audio and without skipping EFB access but other than that are 2500k systems really getting 100% 30fps throughout?
What do you guys think, I need to upgrade or am I not thinking of something obvious that could pull me 5fps back from some place?
(12-01-2011, 02:45 PM)beefywan Wrote: [ -> ]Sorry to hijack the thread but I too would like some advice.
I have an C2D E8400 3GHz overclocked to a rock solid stable 4GHz with 4GB of RAM and an HD4850 512MB.
I've been running Dolphin r7719M x64 recommended settings and I'm having no crashing issues and everything runs very well at 30fps apart from anywhere that has large open areas such as Skyloft when it can drop to as low as 19fps.
I tried to isolate the problem by setting my CPU to stock speed to see if it had a noticeable difference in my framerate but we are talking 1 or 2 frames.
I then clocked my CPU to 3.6GHz and found that I was getting the same performance as I am from 4.0GHz which lead me to believe that the CPU isn't the limiting factor.
I've been very happy running at 1680x1050 at 2x scaling, no AA and 16x AF aside from this framerate dip so I reduced the resolution to native, scaling to native, no AA and 1x AF but I get exactly the same framerate.
Long story short, is everyone seeing this dip in framerate in Skyloft or would upgrading to a 2500k system completely eradicate any dips in framerate?
I appreciate that it would probably allow me to get similiar performance with LLE audio and without skipping EFB access but other than that are 2500k systems really getting 100% 30fps throughout?
What do you guys think, I need to upgrade or am I not thinking of something obvious that could pull me 5fps back from some place?
I can't actually say what your problem might be, but I can say that I just recently upgraded to a 2500k myself and I can run full res with LLE and no slowdown (of course I'm overclocked a bunch too). My previous i7 950 at 3.56 ghz gave me the same solid speed with HLE audio. Hope that helps.
Quote:Long story short, is everyone seeing this dip in framerate in Skyloft or would upgrading to a 2500k system completely eradicate any dips in framerate?
I'm not sure if they would be completely eradicated (and performance varies heavily depending on what build and settings you're using) but it would certainly help a lot. Core 2 duo/quad cpus tend to run into either memory or internal bottlenecks at around 3.6GHz (as you've just discovered first hand).
(12-02-2011, 12:41 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:Long story short, is everyone seeing this dip in framerate in Skyloft or would upgrading to a 2500k system completely eradicate any dips in framerate?
I'm not sure if they would be completely eradicated (and performance varies heavily depending on what build and settings you're using) but it would certainly help a lot. Core 2 duo/quad cpus tend to run into either memory or internal bottlenecks at around 3.6GHz (as you've just discovered first hand).
I see. So would I be better off toning down the overclock to 3.6 and tightening up my memory timings instead?
Not just for emulation but generally.
Nope. Either upgrade or say "fuck it" and walk away.
(12-02-2011, 02:23 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Nope. Either upgrade or say "fuck it" and walk away.
LOL, for now I'm going with the "fuck it" and playing it as is route. Gonna upgrade sometime after christmas when I manage to scrape together £300-£350.
Probably using any newer revision other than 7719 would resolve your Skyward Sword problem, or at least make it better. But then the graphics... Yeah. You get it. You can't get everything. Maybe somebody will fix those fugly vertical lines one day.
You can easily check what the bottleneck is yourself. Open up the task manager and go the the CPU performance tab, it should have an 'activity' meter. Open up Catalyst Control Center and go to the performance tab. Start Dolphin and play a game in windowed mode. If your GPU shows 85% activity and your CPU doesn't get above ~60% load, you know where your bottleneck is. I have a Radeon HD5770 and from what I've seen, that only becomes a bottleneck at 3x IR with 9x AA, but your 4850 is considerably slower. My guess is you're running into BOTH a CPU AND a GPU bottleneck, but the only one who can know for sure is you.
(12-03-2011, 09:25 PM)Cocytus Wrote: [ -> ]You can easily check what the bottleneck is yourself. Open up the task manager and go the the CPU performance tab, it should have an 'activity' meter. Open up Catalyst Control Center and go to the performance tab. Start Dolphin and play a game in windowed mode. If your GPU shows 85% activity and your CPU doesn't get above ~60% load, you know where your bottleneck is. I have a Radeon HD5770 and from what I've seen, that only becomes a bottleneck at 3x IR with 9x AA, but your 4850 is considerably slower. My guess is you're running into BOTH a CPU AND a GPU bottleneck, but the only one who can know for sure is you.
Ha, seems I'm pushing the whole system pretty hard with CPU activity around 85% the whole time but it is indeed the graphics card that is peeking at 99% in the areas where my framerates dip. It's taken me quite by surprise as all common knowledge seems to be that videocards don't need to be all that powerful to run most dolphin games and that CPU's are generally the limiting factor.
Thanks for the tip for measuring GPu activity. it's quite embarrassing that I've overclocked the GPU and never even looked at that activity meter, instead relying on FPS benchmarks from games to measure performance.
Anyway, it's official, Zelda = more graphically demanding than SKyrim! I can run that on High even on this old thing
Now if only we could convince the likes of AMD to release optimized drivers for dolphin >
Quote:You can easily check what the bottleneck is yourself. Open up the task manager and go the the CPU performance tab, it should have an 'activity' meter. Open up Catalyst Control Center and go to the performance tab. Start Dolphin and play a game in windowed mode. If your GPU shows 85% activity and your CPU doesn't get above ~60% load, you know where your bottleneck is. I have a Radeon HD5770 and from what I've seen, that only becomes a bottleneck at 3x IR with 9x AA, but your 4850 is considerably slower.
I'm sorry to tell you this but this is completely false. GPU usage software including CCC can only measure number of shader Ops per second sent to the GPU. Unless the shader throughput is the bottleneck utilization can be well below 100% and you'll still get a bottleneck. You also have no way of accounting for system memory or video memory bottlenecks.
Quote:My guess is you're running into BOTH a CPU AND a GPU bottleneck, but the only one who can know for sure is you.
That's impossible. You can't have more than one component as a bottleneck.
Quote:Anyway, it's official, Zelda = more graphically demanding than SKyrim! I can run that on High even on this old thing
No. Wii emulation = more demanding than skyrim. Don't compare PC games with emulated games.
Quote:so I reduced the resolution to native, scaling to native, no AA and 1x AF but I get exactly the same framerate.
This suggests that the GPU is not the bottleneck. If it was you would see a different in performance between 1x and 2x internal resolution.
Quote:Now if only we could convince the likes of AMD to release optimized drivers for dolphin >
They're already as well optimized as they are going to get.