Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Windows XP (32bit or 64bit) sucks because the processor driver (the one that ships with the OS and even the latest one that you can download from their site) comes with a nasty performance reducing bug that AMD won't fix.

When using a modern AMD CPU and Cool'N'Quiet (AMD's power saving feature) is enabled in the BIOS, the CPU behaves like a crappy (first generation) Phenom I with all its dynamic core underclocking issues.

To get decent performance in Dolphin, you must disable Cool'n'Quiet in the BIOS, set the WinXP power profile to 'Always On' and always run your laptop plugged in (on AC power).

Windows 7 doesn't have this issue. You will get optimal performance with all power saving features enabled (another reason to upgrade)

Windows 7 also has a CPU scheduler that's a bit more efficient than the one in Windows XP. So good that it can extract even more performance out of a 10-year old *single core* CPU.

And yes, a 64-bit version of Dolphin running on a 64-bit OS is noticeably faster.


Use Windows XP only if you have a 'stone age' PC (single core CPU, less than 1GB of RAM and a very old AGP graphics card) or an Atom netbook

(11-27-2011, 10:53 AM)spacepilot Wrote: [ -> ]Are there ways to run dolphin-only without KDE? I bet it would increase performance as well.

- Try a lightweight 64-bit distro with a lean DE (without KDE, Gnome, XFCE or Compiz)

Pick your poison (choose one from the Top 20):
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

- Use the latest AMD Catalyst (fglrx) driver from AMD's site instead of the the slow open source (radeon) driver

- A kernel compiled with 1000Hz / RT options enabled *won't help much*

- 'Optimized' SSE3 or SSE4A builds won't help either. There's barely any difference from the normal (SSE2) builds on AMD CPUs.
See for yourself: Compare Lectrode's optimized SSE3 build of Dolphin r6515 and the regular r6515 build from dolphin-emu.org on WinXP

Maybe my netbook has cool'n quiete - I think i red it somewhere once. However, this option is not in BIOS and I set the power-profile always on maximum because my netbook is rarely running on batteries. Up to now dolphin is the only program causing performance-issues.


No XP64-version of dolphin anymore?! Good that I actually asked for linux . 6515 is not downloadable - afaik not even as source-code. Actually I hoped someone else did compile it already because it's obviously missing.

I actually don't only avoid compiling kernels I also don't like to compile programs in general. Now that I even hear the kernel-recompilation indeed wouldn't have speed up my computer, I think: Man was that a good idea NOT recompiling anything! I propably saved days!

In the same manner I say no win7! It will be slower! It will eat performance like compiling things in linux are a waste of time: For sure!

r6515 became e70e6236248aebe8740a3369e613d07f351c9546 after the switch to git. I doubt you'll find binaries for that anywhere on the forums, nor will anyone bother to compile it for you. If you happen to be willing to compile it yourself, I can tell you how to fix the compilation errors which likely will arise with that old source (it's not much, just ~5 lines of code which need to be changed).

The comments in http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/detail?id=2444 suggest that switching from CONFIG_HZ=250 to CONFIG_HZ=1000 has a greater difference than just "not much", which is why I suggested it. I don't want to force you to do that, it's just probably your best bet. It's also not a matter of "days", you likely already have kernel sources installed (fglrx), just need to invoke "make menuconfig [and change that option]; make; make install" or sth. Heck, maybe there's even some precompiled kernel with CONFIG_HZ=1000 out there.

Windows 7 will likely be faster than anything you can achieve on linux, simply because the OpenGL renderer is crap(ish) and (supposedly) runs slower than the Direct3D backends. But then again, glennrics said Dolphin runs at the same performance on Windows and Linux for him...

Quote:tweaked the cpu frequency governor settings on linux and now I get just as good if not better performance on linux with the ogl backend, than on windows with the ogl backend. It turns out that the default settings for the ondemand cpu frequency governor are too conservative.

Not sure if you have any use for that..

Tip: use kernel-ck.
Update your video driver.
I use linux and am running some games on my machine,. OpenGL is the only problem, but i guess will better with time.

The linux for windows lose because of DX, but the performance is better.

My configuration is the signature

Nobrain, I don't wanna fix compilation errors. Please compile dolphin for me. Same for the kernel: Usually it DOES take days. However I would appreciate if you did copile one for me(newest Trinity-Ubuntu please) and upload it, when it's quick and easy for you.

The governor-thing won't speedup anything - because it regulates the cpu-slowdown when the processor is not in use. This propably won't happen with dolphin :-)

Thanks in advance

'Recompiling' the Ubuntu kernel - the easy way:

Just use Ubuntu's package manager to upgrade to the already precompiled Ubuntu-Studio kernel (with CONFIG_HZ=1000). No compilation needed

Quote: Dolphin runs at the same performance on Windows and Linux.

Only with an NVIDIA GPU (OpenGL performance still sucks on AMD GPUs. AMD's OpenGL driver also has a higher CPU overhead. The more cores you have, the better)

Use Windows 7 and Direct3D for best performance.

Use trayfreq or CPU FreqUtility plasmoid (for KDE), with these applications you can set your CPU frequency to the maximum, for example set the all 4 cores to 3.5GHz on AMD 970. As you may know cpufreq module in Linux kernel raise the frequency for each core separately and process will cycle between cores so if one thread move from core 1 to core 2 the delay will cost some time (in millisecond) to raise the second core's frequency. As tests I've done in openSUSE Linux setting all cores to the maximum frequency will gain 3~5 frame and make applications work more smoothly. Good luck.

http://trayfreq.sourceforge.net/

Plasmoid: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/plasmaCpuFreqUtility?content=144809

Sorry for bad grammar!