Two years ago, my dad bought a Dell XPS through his work (gets discount), for use of a server. Now that we don't use it as a server anymore, I would be interested in trying out this emulator on it.
How well could I run games maxed out (4x IR, 16xaf) with this setup?
Intel i7 960 clocked at 3.2 GHz
ATI Radeon HD 5800
24 GB RAM
I don't have the ability to try it out until tomorrow, so would like a general idea as to how much performance I can expect out of this thing.
On the minimum specs thread, it says that a radeon 5750 or higher can run 4x IR, but since the 5800 is discontinued, do not know how well it will perform.
I don't really play PC games, so I can't use other games to get a ballpark.
Thank you!
It all depends on the games you want to play.
Let's say Super Mario Galaxy 2, SSBB, Mario Kart, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword? Really just the well known games.
This should be enough for most games. Some may give you trouble, though, in which case you'd want to overclock (heavily, like, 4.2 GHz or higher if possible).
With that overclock, SMG2, ZTP and SS should run fine with occasional slowdowns, while SSBB and all four Mario Karts should run flawlessly. (Disclaimer, I'm not the best at estimating performance.)
Also, don't forget, 3.5-367 is old (and stable 3.5 is even older); the real site has much newer development builds:
https://dolphin-emu.org/download/
That's my mistake. I was just trying to create an account, and I kept on leaving things blanked which refreshed me, so I filled in the stuff quickly. That build is for my mac, but I put my OS as windows. Have yet to run the emulator on that computer. That is my mistake.
Now in regards to the emulation, I am not sure if my processor can overclock, and even if it can, I am not sure if I have sufficient cooling to overclock anyway.
Also, what are some reasonable settings that I could run all to almost all games at 100%? Would only using 3x IR help? How about 8xaf instead of 16? Any huge decrease in quality?
(08-12-2013, 04:22 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]This should be enough for most games. Some may give you trouble, though, in which case you'd want to overclock (heavily, like, 4.2 GHz or higher if possible).
With that overclock, SMG2, ZTP and SS should run fine with occasional slowdowns, while SSBB and all four Mario Karts should run flawlessly. (Disclaimer, I'm not the best at estimating performance.)
Also, don't forget, 3.5-367 is old (and stable 3.5 is even older); the real site has much newer development builds: https://dolphin-emu.org/download/
Naw, I wasn't even taking your GPU into consideration, it should be fine with 3x or 4x IR and 16x AF everywhere, plus possibly some AA (disclaimer, I'm even worse at estimating GPU performance). The bottleneck for game speed in those games is the CPU – SMG requires DSP LLE (otherwise you get crashes and missing music), thus drastically increasing its CPU requirement; ZTP's Hyrule Field is incredibly CPU-intensive later in the game (and LLE is recommended, though not entirely necessary); and Skyward Sword is just CPU-intensive in general (although I think it's not as bad as the other two, since it's perfectly fine under DSP HLE in current dev builds). With CPU bottlenecks, reducing the graphical enhancements won't help any – you'll either have to reduce the emulation accuracy (which breaks things), overclock even further, or get a faster CPU.
Just ordered a USB-Bluetooth Adapter and IR Sensor Bar from eBay just now. Looking forward to it.
And I guess I won't know the true performance until I try it out for myself.
From the way you are explaining it, I have the expectation that the emulator will run like garbage. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I would just like it to run well.
Is there really much to worry about with a 3.2 GHz CPU?
**Side Note**
My MacBook Pro (Which is where I got my 'dated' build number from), ran NSMB at 60FPS on 2x IR, and this is with a 2.7 GHz i7, and integrated graphics. What I do understand though is that this game is essentially a 2D game, and not in a 3D environment like the Zelda and Mario games are.
(08-12-2013, 05:09 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]Naw, I wasn't even taking your GPU into consideration, it should be fine with 3x or 4x IR and 16x AF everywhere, plus possibly some AA (disclaimer, I'm even worse at estimating GPU performance). The bottleneck for game speed in those games is the CPU – SMG requires DSP LLE (otherwise you get crashes and missing music), thus drastically increasing its CPU requirement; ZTP's Hyrule Field is incredibly CPU-intensive later in the game (and LLE is recommended, though not entirely necessary); and Skyward Sword is just CPU-intensive in general (although I think it's not as bad as the other two, since it's perfectly fine under DSP HLE in current dev builds). With CPU bottlenecks, reducing the graphical enhancements won't help any – you'll either have to reduce the emulation accuracy (which breaks things), overclock even further, or get a faster CPU.
NSMBW is a very lightweight game (on EFB to Texture, at least – on EFB to RAM it's *much* slower), so, yeah, your guess is on the right track.
I'm not saying it'll run like garbage, I'm just saying you'll get occasional slowdowns that aren't that easy to mitigate. Most things'll be problem-free, though.
If you're worried enough to justify spending money, an
i5-4670K and a decent
Z87 motherboard run for ~$350, or a
better cooler and some
thermal paste run for ~$50.
If that's the case, I'll just give it a try tomorrow to see how it is.
I am not looking at getting too serious into the emulator performance, so I'm not really willing to spend much money to increase performance. If anything, maybe upgrade cooling, but this is not an everyday computer, so a new CPU and Motherboard seem too serious to me.
Am just happy to have an idea as to how it will run. Will give it a shot tomorrow if I can.
Thank you for all of the help!
(08-12-2013, 06:18 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]NSMBW is a very lightweight game (on EFB to Texture, at least – on EFB to RAM it's *much* slower), so, yeah, your guess is on the right track.
I'm not saying it'll run like garbage, I'm just saying you'll get occasional slowdowns that aren't that easy to mitigate. Most things'll be problem-free, though.
If you're worried enough to justify spending money, an i5-4670K and a decent Z87 motherboard run for ~$350, or a better cooler and some thermal paste run for ~$50.
Since you have an OEM system you'll need a new motherboard, new cooler, and new power supply to overclock. At that point you might as well just buy a new cpu.
Paul you can't just throw a new cooler in there. OEM boards are locked down tight when it comes to BIOS configuration options. And they give them just barely enough power for stock settings.