Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(02-22-2014, 05:12 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]But did he really have to unsticky ALL of the useful threads so they can get buried? The whole reason we took the time to make these threads in the first place were to address common questions that we were being bombarded with. Users that read them first would be less likely to ask these questions and even if they did we could just direct them to the appropriate thread to save time. The forum stats will confirm that a lot of people read these threads to get the information that they need and most of them don't post follow up questions. Which means these threads are probably pretty useful even today. If his concerns revolved around them being outdated or some other more specific concern then I would appreciate being told that instead of having them all suddenly unstickied with no warning and no information about how to get them "reinstated" (if that's even possible). Burying all of the useful/popular threads will not reduce user confusion I can promise you that. So I don't really see what the point of this is. It's certainly not preferential to fixing them if there is an issue.

I can sort of understand it being marked unofficial since I'm not a dev. Though that can make it very difficult for a non dev to contribute to the community. The vast majority of these types of useful benchmarks, guides, and info. threads in the past have been made by non devs. For this project the devs have up until very recently rarely contributed to the community in this way and have mostly left this type of thing up to the forum users. Quite frankly I think it's unlikely that a dev will ever make a suitable replacement for these, especially the video card hierarchy thread. Since none of them have ever shown any interest at all in any of these things and some have tried to ignore me when asking for help. Is there really no way a person who doesn't program (and therefore isn't part of the dev team) could write an official thread? Does that really make sense to implement as a rule? I don't know very much about programming but I do know a hell of a lot about CPUs and dolphins performance requirements. So why is a thread about this subject written by me inherently given a lower status than one written by a programmer (which is unlikely to happen for this particular topic)? Shouldn't there be a way for non devs to at least get their information approved by the dev team to be marked official? If no then it's impossible for any non dev to contribute this kind of information to the community in a meaningful way no matter how much work they put into it since neobrain no longer wants to sticky anything unofficial.

For the record this thread could actually use a makeover. And it has received some confusion/complaints from users. But the other two have never once confused any users, given them incorrect conclusions, or troubled anyone in anyway. And they're both extremely useful and frequently seen by users that would not know that they existed if they were buried (which they will be if they're unstickied since info. threads generate a lot of views but very few posts after awhile). So my issue is more with why those two threads were unstickied. I would have actually been ok with this thread being unstickied until I cleaned it up (though of course I would always appreciate being notified first). I try pretty hard to help this community in the ways that I can as evidenced by these threads. But I simply cannot do that under these conditions. It is pointless to spend time making such threads if they aren't stickied because they'll just get buried and no one will see them or know they exist. I would love an opportunity to discuss these things with the devs or even work with them to address any concerns they may have rather than being shut out entirely.

I really genuinely believe that the forums will suffer without any of these threads stickied. And not just because I wrote 2/3 of them.

Hi! Sorry for not PMing you about this before taking actions, I pretty much unsticked the thread as soon as I realized it was sticked at all. To clarify, I did not unstick the thread because I considered it less useful than it used to be, but because I don't see a point in sticking unofficial threads at all. They tend to get outdated too quickly and no one from the dev team cares to update them (or to rewrite them such that this becomes less of an issue, e.g. using phrases like "Dolphin requirements tend to get higher each year" to make clear that information needs to be taken with a grain of salt).

That said, if anything this thread really requires an update (as you said, too), however as Shonumi pointed out, our guides section theoretically is where stuff like this belongs nowadays, if it was official. In this particular case, I'd suggest at least moving content to the wiki (you can probably create a forum thread for it via the wikipage tag). Then others can update the page as well (we can protect the page if you're worried about newbies destroying the content) and eventually we might consider making it an official guide (for which it needs to be on the wiki anyway due to technical reasons).

neobrain Wrote:They tend to get outdated too quickly and no one from the dev team cares to update them (or to rewrite them such that this becomes less of an issue, e.g. using phrases like "Dolphin requirements tend to get higher each year" to make clear that information needs to be taken with a grain of salt).

These issues are just as bad for "official" content though. Devs still don't update them and they get outdated just as quickly.

neobrain Wrote:That said, if anything this thread really requires an update (as you said, too), however as Shonumi pointed out, our guides section theoretically is where stuff like this belongs nowadays, if it was official. In this particular case, I'd suggest at least moving content to the wiki (you can probably create a forum thread for it via the wikipage tag). Then others can update the page as well (we can protect the page if you're worried about newbies destroying the content) and eventually we might consider making it an official guide (for which it needs to be on the wiki anyway due to technical reasons).

Not as good as having a stickied thread which is easily visible but I'll take it. And yes I wouldn't bother writing a wiki article unless I was given some kind of authority/protection to prevent it from being constantly undone. I'm definitely not going through that again. Should I contact you directly through IRC about this or someone else?

Also why on earth isn't the new cpu benchmark stickied? Leaving it unstickied greatly reduces visibility and therefore participation. Which is needed to gather valuable data. And it's run by delroth so it's definitely official and in good hands.

I have been reading this guide for a long while and i believe this is a step in the right direction, from what i gather there is an intel bias in alot of the post and referring to this unofficial guides helps the "intel is better" case

There is no Intel bias here. Bias implies that we haven't done any testing to confirm our conclusion. There is only the easily verifiable fact that modern Intel cpus perform much better than modern AMD cpus in dolphin. Two different community benchmarks have now been conducted which have confirmed this:
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-new-dolphin-cpu-benchmark-no-game-required
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-cpu-benchmark

Out of hundreds of results we have yet to find a single one which does not support the assertion.

Of course everyone here already knew this long before we started officially benchmarking cpus since users would often report their performance with various games on their hardware in various threads and the pattern was pretty obvious.

This thread is fantastic and yet overwhelming.

So I wanted to ask. Does Dolphin take any real advantage of your gpu at all?

Im wondering because my i7 skylake laptop seems to run every game full speed no issues with its integrated intel 520 however my core 2 duo seems to not be anywhere near as consistent with its ati 5670. Its like the gpu literally does nothing here.

Also just a question. I know pentium 4's are dated as hell but, I was running dolphin on a retro build and was shocked that on 2.8ghz p4 with the last build of dolphin I got some pretty smooth playability in parts of games. I was thinking of throwing a p4 extreme in it. Will going from that show a noticeable different? 2.8ghz with 512mb cache to a 3.2ghz with 2mb cache

You will always need a good CPU for emulating the GameCube/Wii CPU (except for games that are lightweight, e.g. Animal Crossing for GameCube). Having a good GPU will not change that, because the GPU is only used for graphics. You do need a good GPU if you want to use lots of graphical enhancements (high resolutions, anti-aliasing...), but since those are optional, you can generally use Dolphin with a less good GPU too.