Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

In our house we really use nothing other than Apple computers.

These are the 2 systems I have run Dolphin on

iMac 27"
OSX 10.7.3
Intel i7 2.8Ghz Quad Core
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
1TB 5400 RPM HDD
8GB RAM
Dolphin 3.0-371

MacBook Pro 17"
OSX 10.7.3 / Windows 7 Ultimate SP1
Intel i7 2.4Ghz Quad Core
ATI Radeon HD 6770M 1GB
750GB 5400 RPM HDD
4GB RAM
Dolphin 3.0-371

Obviously the video card in the second system is newer and has double the memory of the first system. Processor is slower but I believe its a newer version of the i7 itself.

My test game was Mario Kart: Double Dash.

I first ran this on the iMac under OSX. I get around 16 - 25 FPS if I remember correctly. The Super Drive is currently not working so I cannot easily get Windows installed on a Boot Camp partition to test under Windows.

I did the same thing on the MacBook Pro. I first ran under Mac OS and had fairly decent results. I then ran the same game booted into Windows and MKD seemed to run like it would if I was actually playing it on the GC or Wii.

So my question is this. Is it normal to see better results with the Windows release of Dolphin compared to the Mac OS version of Dolphin when running on the same exact machine?

Yes, this is normal. Dolphin is generally optimized for Windows Os and that's why you see better performance in the Windows side. The devs always try to keep up with other OSes also, like Linux, but the main platform is still Windows.

Some of it is that you can't use direct3D9, the fastest graphics backend, without directX 9, which is a windows component.

Yeah I get that. Im extremely technical when it comes to computers.

I have always noticed as well that most emulators that are ported over to Mac OS tend to always run better in Windows. I guess I would think that Core Graphics would have some pretty good efficiency when it comes to being used for emulation.

Once I swap out the Super Drive in the iMac and get Windows installed on a Boot Camp partition, I will test out Dolphin there as well. I am sure that it will trump Dolphin within MacOS. I just wanted to pose the question in regards to the 2 versions of Dolphin and if other people see this.

(03-07-2012, 06:37 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Some of it is that you can't use direct3D9, the fastest graphics backend, without directX 9, which is a windows component.

Thats actually all of it, the direct3D9 video backend in windows is faster than the mac's opengl

OpenGL could be faster than Direct3D if Dolphin was optimized for it. However, the main trend is DirectX because it's easier to implement.

(03-08-2012, 01:42 AM)kernel64 Wrote: [ -> ]OpenGL could be faster than Direct3D if Dolphin was optimized for it. However, the main trend is DirectX because it's easier to implement.

Wait, it's easier to maintain two versions of a graphics backend than only the more difficult one? That sounds weird.

It's kinda correct though. OpenGL is just a terrible API to code for >_>
OGL 3.0 is a bit nicer, but requiring D3D10-level hardware just to have a nice API sounds a bit overkill.

Also note that "maintain" does not necessarily include optimizing stuff.

Okay -- I can't tell, except for a few OpenGL experiments, I never did anything with either of the two.

Still, using only OpenGL means writing the same code only once.

(03-08-2012, 05:21 AM)neobrain Wrote: [ -> ]It's kinda correct though. OpenGL is just a terrible API to code for >_>
OGL 3.0 is a bit nicer, but requiring D3D10-level hardware just to have a nice API sounds a bit overkill.

Its time for...a new plugin