Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Relevant Specs:

Latest Dolphin revision: 3.0-371
Windows 7 x64
Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.9GHz
Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU Cooler (as in I can overclock pretty well)
ASUS Crosshair V 990FX Motherboard
AMD Radeon 6970 @ 900MHz
12GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz
1920 x 1080 display

So I bought my motherboard anticipating bulldozer for a CPU upgrade because I have already begun to feel that my CPU is holding back my system. I'm pretty confident that my issues in Dolphin (below full speed in pretty much every game at my desired settings) is due to a CPU bottleneck. CPU usage in Dolphin for my is almost 100% on all four cores. However, in some cases, with SSAA enabled on high native resolution, my graphics card reaches 99% utilisation. This worries me as although I have read that Dolphin is highly CPU oriented and does not require an extremely high end GPU, mine seems to be working pretty hard. I am also aware that Dolphin does not support multiple GPUs and that Bulldozer is absolute garbage so I'm faced with a few problems to solve:

Is my graphics card really holding my system back with Dolphin? (this would mean I'd have to get a 7970 or GTX 580 for increased performance, although I'm not aware of whether or not Dolphin prefers Nvidia or AMD's GPU architecture)

With my CPU as my limiting factor here, what would be the best upgrade? (i.e. platform switch to Sandy Bridge or wait for Ivy)

Is an AM3+ CPU completely out of the question for an effective upgrade?

The games I play on Dolphin are:
Animal Crossing
Fire Emblem
Mario Kart (Wii/Double Dash)
Mario Super Sluggers/Superstar Baseball
SSBB/SSBM
Sonic: Adventure 2 Battle, Colours, Heroes
Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy
Star Fox Adventures/Assault
(I'd like to know if my expectations in terms of settings (3x Native Res/9x SSAA) are unrealistic)


Please let me know if you'd like any more information.

How much VRAM does the 6970 card have? What resolutions are you running Dolphin at? The video card should not be stressed unless you are running at really high resolutions with AA etc.

There isn't really a lot of data on how Dolphin runs on Bulldozer. However, there is a fair bit of Intel-only code optimisation in the Dolphin.

If you are happy with the cash outlay for a new Intel system, I'd wait for Ivy Bridge just to get that little bit more performance out of the emulator.

Otherwise, upgrade to Bulldozer and let us all know how well it runs.

Quote:There isn't really a lot of data on how Dolphin runs on Bulldozer.

Although this is true I must point out that almost all software runs extremely poorly on bulldozer. The only software that achieves decent performance with bulldozer is highly multithreaded software with near a near perfect load balance on all threads (video encoders and such). It is safe to assume that dolphin will run poorly on it since literally every other application with 4 or less major threads does.

Quote:Is my graphics card really holding my system back with Dolphin? (this would mean I'd have to get a 7970 or GTX 580 for increased performance, although I'm not aware of whether or not Dolphin prefers Nvidia or AMD's GPU architecture)

That depends on your settings. The higher you set internal resolution and SSAA, the more work the gpu needs to do. Turning on per-pixel lighting also increases gpu load a lot.
Some resources for you to read:
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=18414
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=20712

Quote:(I'd like to know if my expectations in terms of settings (3x Native Res/9x SSAA) are unrealistic)

9xSSAA is way too demanding for any graphics card on the market right now with your internal resolution set that high. Turn off SSAA and set your internal resolution to 4x and you'll be fine. If you need AA you can use MLAA in CCC or MSAA in the d3d11 backend with almost no performance hit.

Quote:Is an AM3+ CPU completely out of the question for an effective upgrade?

In my opinion (and nearly everyone else's as well), yes. Benchmarks/reviews don't lie, bulldozer is a colossal failure on every level. Nothing runs dolphin (as well as x86 software in general) better than sandy bride or sandy bridge E right now. Ivy bridge will replace sandy bridge and ivy bridge E will replace sandy bridge E later this year (ivy bridge will be launched in april and iby bridge E will be launched sometime later in the year). It's up to you whether you want to upgrade or not. The biggest advantage of ivy bridge will be reduced power consumption/heat and potentially better overclocking. Even intel has stated that cpu performance is only expected to go up 10-20% with ivy bridge, and that's with a best case scenario for software (a 20% increase over sandy bridge will only be attainable with AVX heavy code according to intel).

It's up to you whether you want to wait or not.

The 6970 has 2GB of vRAM. Thanks for all the info NaturalViolence, I'll read up. By the way, I did have per-pixel lighting on, so I'm gonna see if it makes a difference in terms of GPU stress real quick here. Also, what's typically the best backend to use? I've been using DX9 for now.

Maybe by the time we get to a 500 or 600GB memory bandwidth video card we will be able to use 4x IR and 9XAA.

Quote:Also, what's typically the best backend to use? I've been using DX9 for now.

Whatever works well for the game you're playing and the graphics card you are using. All three of them work equally well with most games. OpenGL is usually slow on windows when using AMD graphics cards or nvidia geforce 200 series or earlier. D3d9 and d3d11 tend to run fast with most setups and games but d3d9 is usually a bit faster, it depends on the graphics card (and drivers) though. Some games have specific issues with a particular backend that requires you to use a different backend.

Quote:Maybe by the time we get to a 500 or 600GB memory bandwidth video card we will be able to use 4x IR and 9XAA.

High internal resolutions are stressful on shader throughput, vram bandwidth, and vram capacity. But yeah vram bandwidth is the biggest concern out of the three. I wish I could determine some kind of a pattern from the gpu benchmark results so I could figure that out but there doesn't appear to be one. However if I had to take a guess I would say that 600GB/s is probably about what would be needed based on the requirements of the other settings, so you're actually probably right on the money, but it depends on the game.

Right, thanks. I just tried toggling per-pixel lighting in Super Mario Sunshine and it made no difference in framerate/GPU utilisation whatsoever. Is there a particular game (preferably one on the list) that someone knows of which might be a demanding title to enable PPL in?

JUST TURN OFF SSAA.

Haha okay, it's off. By the way, I don't think MLAA works with Dolphin, but the MSAA in dx11 seems to work well. Thanks for all your help.

Quote: By the way, I don't think MLAA works with Dolphin

How could it not? It's post-processing therefore it should work with any application, I'm fairly certain I've seen people use AMDs MLAA with dolphin before (not that I would recommend it, because it sucks).