Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Quote:6850 is SAME price as 7750

Only if you're buying a second-hand (used) card.

IcemanSR Wrote:Only up in price on 7750 is LOW power consumption

* Power consumption so low that even the ultra low-end HTPC cards look like power guzzlers. The HD7750 consumes less power than even the HD5570 GDDR3.
<5W @ idle, ~1W @ long idle, <45W @ full load

* It also has features like the VCE (better than Intel's QuickSync), EQAA and Fast HDMI that the HD6850 lacks.

* Anisotropic filtering quality is also much better than the HD6000 series. The horrible shimmering artifacts are finally fixed.

* Users also experience better responsiveness (less lag) with the new HD7xxx series of cards.

* The 'good old' HD6850 is a long (2x the length of the HD7750) and fat (uses 2 slots) card (needs a much bigger case with optimal cooling)

* Finally, the HD6850 it's 'overkill' for emulation and not everyone plays modern PC MMO FPS games

IcemanSR Wrote:One gotta be Einstein to make super rocketed drivers to make 7750 to work as 6850

The HD7750 is already a much better performer (than the HD6850) in compute (OpenCL / DirectCompute), tessellation, video encoding / processing. It has more than enough power for PCSX2 and Dolphin @ 1080p / 4xIR + VSync.

This thread is not about how fast the 7770 is or whether is was a good buy. Go back and read the OP Iceman.

[UPDATE] First post updated with some HD6850 results

Hey all

I registered at the forums here after being made aware of this thread over on the PCSX2 forums.

I post here as a fellow ATI 7000 series victim, having purchased a 7950 card exactly a week ago. Prior to the "upgrade" I was using a HD5670 and purchased the new card primarily to get better speeds in my PC games and was unaware of the 7000 series's problems with emulators. I should point out that I am not a Dolphin user but wanted to post here to back up what kirby has said with my own experiences. I apolgise for posting on an emulation forum that I myself have not used the emulator of at present. I will understand completely if I'm banned but I wanted to voice my extreme frustration at the 7000 cards. My emulator of choice is PCSX2.

In either event prior to the upgrade I was getting moderately good speeds in most games (50-60 fps with frame limiting enabled and speed hacks on) depending on the game, but a few days after getting the new card and testing pcsx2 emulation I noticed an immediate drop of 10-20 fps in all games. Note that prior to the upgrade I was using direct x10 in the emulator and moved to direct x 11 with the new one (there is no way to select direct x10 if you have an 11 capable card). Note also that I focused on direct x11 and did not do extensive tests on direct x9 so there could possibly be a way of fixing things there I dunno. I tried updating drivers etc which had no effect and after further investigations discovered that the card was running in an idle state whilst the emulator was running, underclocking itself to 300MHZ (confirmed in both Cataclyst overdrive and in MSI Afterburner) as the card was apparently assuming that I was watching a video on my PC and not playing a game so not applying higher clock speeds.

The odd thing to note in addition is that in all games I tested an additional drop of 10-15 fps occured 5 minutes into play. In my tests I tried both standing at a location where there was a fixed static amount of elements present as well as running around a specific area and not entering new ones and the results were the same. Speeds dropped by an additional 7-15 fps by the 10 minute mark (to between 15-25 fps). None of that had occured on the previous card. I was advised on forums to try forcing the card to higher clock speeds to resolve the 300MHZ idle state issue and so tried that in Catalyst Overdrive which didn't work other than in short bursts, but doing it in MSI Afterburner worked (I set the clock to 1000HZ and the memory clock to 1350) which in some games fixed speeds for the first few minutes, but not longer than 5 minutes due to the diminishing framerates which still occured. And the fixing of speeds was only in certain areas. Areas which had all ran fine with the previous card.

Increasing the power to the card by 10% and increasing the fan speeds by 75% helped in the short term also, but at the end of the day speeds were not even close to what I had been getting with the older card. An upgrade should result in better performance NOT in worser speeds so I have taken my computer back to the shop I bought the card from in the hopes of trading it for an nvidia card though I am not confident that they will allow that since everything else on my computer runs fine. Initially they have blamed the problems on my PC (amount of dust around my CPU fan, the fact I use a Win7 32bit rather than 64 bit etc) rather than the card, which I know not to be true considering that everything was fine a week ago.

So in closing I would HIGHLY recommend to anyone considering purchasing a 7000 series radeon card, DON'T. If your into emulation, go with an nvidia card.

Goodluck to you Kirby, I hope you have better success than I have had.

(06-09-2012, 05:30 AM)hockland Wrote: [ -> ]If your into emulation, go with an nvidia card.

FYI, the latest NVIDIA cards (the GeForce 6xx series) also have a similar problem.

The best cards for emulation (with the Direct3D backends) are still the good old ATI Radeon HD5000 series. Stable, high performance DirectX drivers with almost zero issues.
Much better performance than NVIDIA in Direct3D11 mode and the same performance in Direct3D9 mode.

For OpenGL, NVIDIA is a much better choice. AMD's OpenGL drivers are still slow and flaky.

The AMD HD6000 series is not bad. The same (great DX11 and DX9) performance as the HD5000 series in PCSX2 , but somewhat worse in Dolphin (especially with VSync).

The HD7000 series is ****. Crappy drivers with lots of problems. Terrible performance in emulators (2D and 3D) / Windows7 Aero UI / Flash.
Nice GPGPU performance though (a low-end HD7750 performs way better than a much more expensive HD6870).

NOTE: If you're still using a high-resolution analog CRT display or projector, you should know that the VGA output quality of the new HD7000 series is significantly worse than the almost perfect quality of the previous (HD5000 and HD6000) series.

the nvidia cards however, have a easily adjustable setting to force max performance though.

I have an ASUS CUII HD7870. With pcsx2 and DX11 i get steady 60fps using 3x internal res in most games.

On the other hand in Dolphin i get much better performance with DX9 (60fps at 2x internal even in scenes like the Observatory in MG).

I can't speak for any of the other cards in the series, but when running Dolphin I rarely see the activity on my HD 7750 (as reported by CCC) go above 50% and never above 60%; it usually sits between 40-43% but tends to drop sharply for brief moments. I've only seen this behaviour in Dolphin so far, other 3D applications seem fine. Does anyone else experience the same issue on cards in the 7000-series? The 7750 should technically (if only just) be able to render most games at 4x IR, but if you can't use the card to its fullest potential then obviously the actual performance will be quite a bit worse.

Note that I have 2 monitors, so I can monitor the activity on the card while playing Dolphin; there's no alt-tabbing foolishness going on here.

GPU load tells us nothing. What is your performance like at 3x IR and 4x IR?

3x IR: Most games run smoothly in most areas, rare but reproducible slowdowns in certain areas of most games I've played with.
4x IR: Generally sluggish, usually struggles to run most games @ 100% speed regardless (more or less) of what settings are used. Can expect slowdowns of at least 5-10% in most cases, some gpu-heavy areas drop down to ~10fps.

FYI, apparently the GPU load issue was also present on some older-generation Radeon cards and I've found the same solution has worked for me: disable the PowerPlay feature, which switches the card between 2D and 3D clock speeds. With this fix applied, it looks like games will run pretty smooth on 4x IR from the brief testing I've done. Of course, I've only had the fix applied for an hour or so but I'm too tired to see how well it actually works tonight. I'll be able to take a more in-depth look tomorrow.