Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello Everyone!

I have been playing Gamecube games on Dolphin for a while and have been able to run them all at the highest settings. I recently bought a big enough flash drive so I can now rip and play my Wii games. The problem is that I have to have the lowest settings just for them to run. For example in Super Mario Galaxy, i get 100% speed when standing still, but as soon as I start moving and playing the game my speed hangs between 50-95% with major lag spikes here and there. I have been told that my system is more than enough to run these games fine, but its just not working.

My Rig:
-AMD FX-8320 (8 core) @ 4.1ghz
-Cooler Master hyper 212+ cooler
-G.Skill Ripjaw RAM 8gb at 1600mhz
-MSI Hawk Radeon HD 7870, 1220mV, Core Clock 1170MHz, Mem Clock 1320MHz
-Seagate barracuda 1tb HDD 7200rpm
-750w Thermaltake PSU
-Rosewill ThorV2 case

EDIT: Forgot to add that im running Dolphin 3.5-606

Quote:AMD FX-8320
Super Mario Galaxy

Overclock your CPU ! Your CPU does not stand a chance aganst i5 2400 in Dolphin (Yes we have benchmark data)
i5 2400 is not strong enough to run SMG full speed
If you used LLE backend , you would get lower speed

Quote: I have been told that my system is more than enough to run these games fine

For most games , yes
SMG is out of your league

How is my processor not enough to run this game? It is an 8 core 4.1ghz processor that was supposed to be top of the line.

In these benchmarks it seems to compare fairly well against the i5 2400. http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/357/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8320_vs_Intel_Core_i5_i5-2400.html

What do I need to do/buy to make it work?

Quote:It is an 8 core 4.1ghz processor that was supposed to be top of the line.

It's a midrange cpu from AMD. Clock rate and number of cores are not the only factors that determine performance. Piledriver cores handle certain types of code/algorithms very poorly. It just so happens that dolphin contains a lot of the types of algorithms that the architecture is not well suited to.

Quote:In these benchmarks it seems to compare fairly well against the i5 2400.

It depends on the application.

Quote:What do I need to do/buy to make it work?

Overclocking will help a bit. But beyond that there is nothing more you can do other than swap out your motherboard and cpu with an Intel ivy bridge cpu and LGA1155 motherboard.

http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-cpu-benchmark?page=14
Look at post #137
Dolphin is a dual core application . Bulldozer/Piledriver are bad at single threaded performance that's why

Well shucks... I guess I am going to start looking at new motherboards and CPU's.

You should wait next gen - Haswell i5 4670k or i7 4770k CPU (June-2013)

Sweet, I will be looking forward to getting the next gen of intel!

Alright so it is 7 months later, what is the latest news as far as this information goes? Should I wait until the next generation of intel processors come out in 2014, or should I get a nice haswell cpu and motherboard for Christmas? Dolphin emulator 4.0 has been out for almost a month, so I figured I should see what you guys say before I drop more money into my rig.

Is it safe to say that for best single thread performance I should stick with Intel?