Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

game properties screenshot?

Turn on Idle Skipping.

And Vbeam emulation

(11-30-2011, 02:38 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:The GTX 460 is not a monster card--it's entry to mid-range performing GPUs.

......sigh.....here we go again.

GTX 460 is considered upper midrange. However it's FAR more powerful than what dolphin needs. It's easily capable of 3x IR and 4xSSAA at the same times (which is essentially 6x IR).

Maybe by your standards, but not mine. GTX 560 is the way to go and it cost just about the same price point of the GTX 460. A GTX 460 is enough for dolphin you say? Maybe, but that's not the case with another popular emulator, pcsx2. Since most of my testing were done on the other emulator, i can't say fully agree with you on this one. I went from a GTX 460 192-bit 768MB, AMD HD 6950 2GB, AMD HD 6970 2GB, GTX 570, and finally GTX 580. Unfortunately I can no longer do the testing to confirm your statement because all of my previous GPUs I that have brought for testing was returned.

With each gpu step up, I gained more fps, that's how I figured out that a GTX 460 is not ENOUGH. Base on my finding, Nvidia GPUs produces more FPS compared to AMD GPUs. Pretty much everything tops out at a GTX 570 level, but that 3GB of vRam from the GTX 580 did some goods.

Quote:Maybe by your standards, but not mine.

Not my standards, Nvidia/AMDs standards.
<$50 is minimalist
$50-100 is low end
$100-150 is lower middle end
$150-200 is middle end
$150-250 is upper middle end
$250-350 is high end
$350-600 is very high end
$600+ is enthusiast

Those are the price platforms that they use. Both the GTX 460 and GTX 560 are considered middle end cards by current standards.

Quote:GTX 560 is the way to go and it cost just about the same price point of the GTX 460.

It costs about $20 more on average and performs about 10% better on average. The performance per dollar of both of them is identical. Keep in mind I'm talking about the 1GB edition of the GTX 460 since that's the only edition that any brand sells anymore and the only edition anyone buys.

Quote:A GTX 460 is enough for dolphin you say?

Yes. The only thing a GTX 460 can't handle is 4x IR and SSAA at the same time, which no GPU can handle.

Quote:Maybe, but that's not the case with another popular emulator, pcsx2.

Yes it is. Although pcsx2 is a lot more demanding on the gpu than dolphin a GTX 460 is still way more than enough for pcsx2 unless you set the internal resolution to some insanely high number like 2048 x 2048.

Quote:With each gpu step up, I gained more fps, that's how I figured out that a GTX 460 is not ENOUGH.

You were probably using some insane settings then, that's the only way you could have seen any difference in performance between those cards.

For PCSX2 I can see how a GTX 560 or GTX 560 TI might be justified if you enjoy running games at extremely high internal resolutions. It's also justified for PC gaming. But for dolphin it's pointless. Do not act like the GTX 560 is some glorious super powerful card and the GTX 460 1GB is shit when there is barely any difference between them in performance.

Quote: Base on my finding, Nvidia GPUs produces more FPS compared to AMD GPUs. Pretty much everything tops out at a GTX 570 level,

Depends. Not sure about pcsx2 but for dolphin nvidia gpus perform better with the openGL backend, AMD gpus perform better with the d3d9 backend, and both brands perform similarly in the d3d11 backend.

Here is some data for you: http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=14201
4x IR is equivalent to 2x IR + 4xSSAA. As you can see the only way to achieve a low framerate on a high end card is to combine both a high IR and SSAA. Considering that no GPU can handle 3x IR + 9xSSAA and 4xSSAA won't make any difference to image quality if your IR is already high there is literally no point in getting anything higher than a GTX 460 for dolphin.

Quote:but that 3GB of vRam from the GTX 580 did some goods.

That's not possible. Both dolphin and pcsx2 will run out of shader throughput/vram bandwidth way before they run out of vram. You should not see any difference in performance in either dolphin or pcsx2 between a 1.5GB GTX 580 and 3GB GTX 580 clocked at the same speeds.