Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

You guys win. I'm making an intel based system next rig. But I'm still going to make a lot of profit out of this one.

I would just like to point out that I was never trying to convince you to buy an Intel cpu or even criticize your product decision. I was originally trying to inform you why people recommend them in PC gaming and emulation forums since you asked. Then when you disagreed with a few of the points I was making in that explanation I wanted to hold a civil/academic debate on the arguments you raised. I believe that has happened now and I thank you for playing along better than most and not resorting to childish insults at any time during the process (you would not believe how often this happens).

Also I'm going to assume that steamroller/broadwell will be out by the time that you build your next rig. In which case nothing we've said here will have any real weight in that decision. You'll need to evaluate those products separately once they are released. AMD does appear to be heading in the right direction with steamroller shifting focus back to improving IPC. But I've been duped before by their marketing so I'll reserve judgement until it hits retailers. Broadwell isn't expected to boost IPC or clock rates much if at all so AMD might actually be able to catch up on that front.

(07-03-2013, 08:44 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]I would just like to point out that I was never trying to convince you to buy an Intel cpu or even criticize your product decision. I was originally trying to inform you why people recommend them in PC gaming and emulation forums since you asked. Then when you disagreed with a few of the points I was making in that explanation I wanted to hold a civil/academic debate on the arguments you raised. I believe that has happened now and I thank you for playing along better than most and not resorting to childish insults at any time during the process (you would not believe how often this happens).

Also I'm going to assume that steamroller/broadwell will be out by the time that you build your next rig. In which case nothing we've said here will have any real weight in that decision. You'll need to evaluate those products separately once they are released. AMD does appear to be heading in the right direction with steamroller shifting focus back to improving IPC. But I've been duped before by their marketing so I'll reserve judgement until it hits retailers. Broadwell isn't expected to boost IPC or clock rates much if at all so AMD might actually be able to catch up on that front.

You've been informative, it was a pleasant discussion. I also thank you for not being condescending, and sticking to logic and facts rather and feelings and insults.

(07-03-2013, 06:55 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

omarman Wrote:P.S. If Dolphin wasn't so poorly optimized for multi-cores, we could run fair-er tests.

"If it doesn't take advantage of the differences in my architecture then it's not a fair test."

This logic was used by those defending the Itanium and Netburst microarchitectures back in the day. It is poor logic. It needs to die. Different workloads require different algorithms, this will always be true. Some algorithms are not going to be well suited to the design choices used in a given microarchitecture. You cannot evaluate cpu performance based off of "what if" scenarios. The only fair way to evaluate cpu performance is to test software that actually exists and is actually used by users. Some algorithms simply can't be redesigned to run well on certain microarchitectures that emphasize things that the algorithm doesn't need and/or can't make use of.

Like others have said what you ask also happens to be impossible in this particular case due to the way emulation works. If you use the forum search you'll find lots of long posts about this topic including some by the devs. I've written about this topic myself so many times that I'm not going to do it again here. But to sum it up, it's because the GC/Wii only has 3 chips that do most of the processing work that we can emulate. And they're all single threaded. If the GC/Wii had an 8 core cpu we would have no problem making dolphin use 8 cores, but it doesn't. We can't emulate something in parallel if the real hardware doesn't do it in parallel.

@tiktakt0w

Your attitude isn't helping.

omarman Wrote:I'm going to check it out, I have most of my parts already, just waiting for my Hyper 212+ , case, and solid state to arrive. I will see if I notice any stuttering at all.

You can do that. But whether you notice it doesn't really matter. Especially when you don't have another system in front of you to compare it against.

Ah sorry sorry, I'm trying to be humorous.

Quote:Take a number

Double it

Take off 1

Square it

Divide it by 3

find its cubic root

Spit this out

8
8+8 = 16
16-1=15
15*15=225
225/3=75
cubic root (75) = 4.21 aprox

oh you meant on the cpu?

even if Dolphin emulates 3 cpus in series using 2 cores, and an aditional core for LLE audio, i wonder if theres some less critical code that could be offloaded to a fourth core (like the joypad reading, disk acceses etc... something like that)

tiktakt0w Wrote:Ah sorry sorry, I'm trying to be humorous.

Responding to people in the most antagonizing way possible is not being humorous.

And if someone presents evidence as part of their argument, whether it be a video, text article, or anything else it's your responsibility to read/watch/listen to it before you respond. Even if you think they're crazy and/or stupid. If you expect them to read through your data you have to read through theirs, it only goes both ways. Keep this in mind in the future. Even if you're right you need to act courteous and give them the benefit of the doubt if they're doing the same to you. If they're acting like a dick on the other hand it's ok to respond the same way. Although you really shouldn't. It's better to just point out that they're being a dick and remain calm.

omega_rugal Wrote:Dolphin emulates 3 cpus

What?

omega_rugal Wrote:i wonder if theres some less critical code that could be offloaded to a fourth core (like the joypad reading, disk acceses etc... something like that)

Doing so wouldn't offer any measurable let alone noticeable performance improvement. Nearly all of the cpu cycles are eaten up by CPU, GPU, and DSP emulation.

(07-04-2013, 03:16 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]What?

3 chips, you said 3 chips (CPU,GPU and DSP)

3 chips isn't the same as 3 CPUs.

Also, a lot of code to do with other parts of the Wii is run on separate threads to the main three, but as mentioned before, these don't really have much work to do, so make no noticeable difference to overall speed.

omega_rugal Wrote:even if Dolphin emulates 3 cpus in series using 2 cores, and an aditional core for LLE audio, i wonder if theres some less critical code that could be offloaded to a fourth core (like the joypad reading, disk acceses etc... something like that)

Dolphin has what we call "major" threads and "minor" threads. Dolphin can have at most 3 major threads (one for emulating the video, the CPU, and sound). However it has quite a few minor threads doing various small jobs; I think someone numbered them at around 20 minor threads. The minor threads already handle things like input handling (input is almost always multi-threaded to my knowledge, at least with modern APIs) GUI rendering, file I/O, and playing sound (different from generating the sound data, i.e. DSP emulation). The amount of processing done is very small though, probably 5~10% (crapshot guess). It'd actually be worrisome if these were using any more processing, imo.

(07-04-2013, 11:52 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]3 chips isn't the same as 3 CPUs.

Are we going to do this all day?