08-20-2013, 11:07 AM
I have been using task manager and GPU-Z and the GPU is maxing out at 83% GPU usage and my CPU is being maxed out at 60% with dolphin and I am not getting fullspeed. How can I force dolphin to max out all my PC's resources?
08-20-2013, 11:07 AM
Qaazavaca Qaanic
08-20-2013, 11:38 AM
Your GPU is shit. Your CPU is shit. Ultrabooks are not built for emulation.
Yes this is because you have an ultrabook, so the CPU turbos at 2.6 ghz, which is not fast enough to run dolphin well. I know from experience that Dolphin dev doesn't run well at 3.3 ghz on a better laptop, but 3.5 release works. Ultrabooks are not meant for really high-performance gaming. If you wanted that, buy a gaming laptop, or better, build a gaming PC. Cheaper than a prebought gaming PC of similar performance, as Dolphin needs really great single-thread performance and is much less demanding of the GPU compared to PC games. That's because the CPU is better at emulating more functions of the Wii, but it's still really expensive. The GPU just renders the graphics, which has less overhead than CPU/chip/everything-in-a-Wii emulation.
Dolphin probably cannot be optimized for four cores.
So I suggest trying 3.5 (buggy), and if it's still too slow, try 3.0 (buggier).
Yes this is because you have an ultrabook, so the CPU turbos at 2.6 ghz, which is not fast enough to run dolphin well. I know from experience that Dolphin dev doesn't run well at 3.3 ghz on a better laptop, but 3.5 release works. Ultrabooks are not meant for really high-performance gaming. If you wanted that, buy a gaming laptop, or better, build a gaming PC. Cheaper than a prebought gaming PC of similar performance, as Dolphin needs really great single-thread performance and is much less demanding of the GPU compared to PC games. That's because the CPU is better at emulating more functions of the Wii, but it's still really expensive. The GPU just renders the graphics, which has less overhead than CPU/chip/everything-in-a-Wii emulation.
Dolphin probably cannot be optimized for four cores.
So I suggest trying 3.5 (buggy), and if it's still too slow, try 3.0 (buggier).
08-20-2013, 01:08 PM
jimbo1qaz Wrote:Your GPU is shit. Your CPU is shit.
This is extremely antagonizing towards him and has nothing to do with what he asked.
The reason he sees 60% cpu usage is because dolphin is a dual core app and with hyperthreading his OS sees 4 logical cores. Dolphin is using both physical cores but it only using 2 of the 4 logical cores. So that's normal. The reason his gpu load is 83% is because the cpu is bottlenecking it. Which is also normal.
That's all you had to say to answer his question.
08-20-2013, 01:36 PM
OK, I checked in performance monitor, and turns out, it's a gpu bottleneck because none of my 4 cores are maxed out, but turns out, they're all working when dolphin's running meaning it is in fact multithreading very well. Turns out, it must be GPU-Z thinks that the GPU is running at 83% when it is really pushing its hardest because lower resolutions do in fact change performance. Either that, or dolphin isn't pushing my graphics card all the way. Well, at least it only slows down at specific points of the game, so it's not that bad. I guess I have to play at 720p or lower maybe.
08-20-2013, 02:18 PM
Nope. Dolphin is a dual core application. But the OS kernel cycles the thread affinity every few microseconds. Task manager only updates a couple times a second and it records the average level of activity over that entire interval of time for each core. Which is why you see 4 cores at 50% instead of 2 at 100% and 2 at 0%. But at any given moment of time only 2 logical cores are active. In other words dolphin only ever uses 2 cores at once but the 2 threads jump from core to core very rapidly. So rapidly that task manager can't accurately display them and you instead end up with an average value instead of an instantaneous value.
If you want to test this lock the process affinity of dolphin.exe to core 0 and core 3. This will prevent the threads from jumping around. You'll get the same performance but you'll see 2 cores at 100% load and 2 cores at 0% load. Or use an older build like dolphin 3.0 and turn on "lock threads to cores" which is an option dolphin used to have to stop the threads from jumping from core to core.
As far as your GPU comments go this assumes that the CPU/GPU threads never stall and always work in parallel. Which is not true. GPUz is measuring idle time accurately.
If you want to test this lock the process affinity of dolphin.exe to core 0 and core 3. This will prevent the threads from jumping around. You'll get the same performance but you'll see 2 cores at 100% load and 2 cores at 0% load. Or use an older build like dolphin 3.0 and turn on "lock threads to cores" which is an option dolphin used to have to stop the threads from jumping from core to core.
As far as your GPU comments go this assumes that the CPU/GPU threads never stall and always work in parallel. Which is not true. GPUz is measuring idle time accurately.