You can't get Skyrim anywhere near maxed out with its own settings, and it'll run with its own settings maxed out on a toaster. It can only be used as a 'look how good my GPU is' thing if it's got a good ENB and plenty of mesh and texture mods.
Also it's limited to 60 FPS because the engine doesn't show animations correctly at higher values, so I'm not sure how you're getting 80.
You can actually disable the frame limit but it makes the physics go crazy
teh_speleegn_polease Wrote:Well, unless the CPU has some part in rdndering and/or applying AA, it's definitely not that (as lowering the res allows me to run almost any game fullspeed, except maybe Metroid Prime with EFB to RAM).
GPU bottleneck then for sure.
teh_speleegn_polease Wrote:And I don't think it's throttling... Usage is shown as 100% (using Open Hardware Monitor).
That means absolutely nothing.
To give a rather poor car analogy this would be like taking a car whose max speed is normally 160 mph and modifying the fuel injection valve to allow less fuel in. Thus changing the new max speed to 40 mph. You can then say technically that the car is going fullspeed even when it's only goign 40 mph.
Or to put it a better way usage is not the same as speed. Saying a processor is running at 100% usage/load tells you nothing about how fast that processor is.
teh_speleegn_polease Wrote:And in fact, running most PC games - such as Skyrim - at max settings (including maxing everything I could in the Nvidia control panel) I can run easily at 80 or so FPS...
That also means nothing. Just because skyrim isn't throttling your GPU doesn't mean dolphin won't. They're two completely different applications. Dolphin is known to have throttling issues with newer cards because the GPU thread spends long periods of time idle, waiting for the cpu thread to do something. This causes the GPU drivers to think that you're not running a demanding application when in fact you are. So the gpu drivers throttle the GPU to reduce power consumption the same way they do when you're running say a web browser for example. PC games don't have this issue because the GPU thread typically doesn't have to wait for the rest of the game engine to catch up. It simply runs as fast as it can (normally) and sends a constant uninterrupted stream of commands to the GPU driver. Or to put that another way gamespeed is linked to framerate in dolphin but not in PC games. Nvidia/AMD drivers haven't been optimized around this behavior since modern PC games don't use it.
Check your GPU clock rates while running dolphin please.
(03-08-2014, 05:18 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: [ -> ]You can actually disable the frame limit but it makes the physics go crazy
And destroys animations (as I said), and any other Havok-based content, so therefore no-one does it.
(03-08-2014, 08:57 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]That also means nothing. Just because skyrim isn't throttling your GPU doesn't mean dolphin won't. They're two completely different applications. Dolphin is known to have throttling issues with newer cards because the GPU thread spends long periods of time idle, waiting for the cpu thread to do something. This causes the GPU drivers to think that you're not running a demanding application when in fact you are. So the gpu drivers throttle the GPU to reduce power consumption the same way they do when you're running say a web browser for example. PC games don't have this issue because the GPU thread typically doesn't have to wait for the rest of the game engine to catch up. It simply runs as fast as it can (normally) and sends a constant uninterrupted stream of commands to the GPU driver. Or to put that another way gamespeed is linked to framerate in dolphin but not in PC games. Nvidia/AMD drivers haven't been optimized around this behavior since modern PC games don't use it.
Check your GPU clock rates while running dolphin please.
I didn't even need to check my rates, but just changing my GPU settings to Performance rather than Power Saving immediately gave me full speed 100% of the time at 4x IR and 8x CSAA.
The reason it was on power saving in the first place is because each revision is considered a separate application (which makes sense, since I don't replace the old revisions with new ones but rather add the new ones into a different directory). So even though I set it to performance mode a while ago, since then I updated a few times and forgot to change my settings again... So thanks for the help.
I'm probably gonna change my global settings to Performance, since I don't really care about power consumption.
(03-08-2014, 04:43 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]You can't get Skyrim anywhere near maxed out with its own settings, and it'll run with its own settings maxed out on a toaster. It can only be used as a 'look how good my GPU is' thing if it's got a good ENB and plenty of mesh and texture mods.
Or you can max out all kinds of AA in the Nvidia control panel, which would make a toaster crash while trying to render a textureless plain cube. And then say "look how good my GPU is" when it runs at insane frames per second (e.g. while in a menu, it ran at literally 1.5k fps for me. Of course, it wasn't that fast in-game =P). Otherwise, I know it's not the most demanding game ever, but I don't really have that many demanding games.
(03-08-2014, 04:43 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Also it's limited to 60 FPS because the engine doesn't show animations correctly at higher values, so I'm not sure how you're getting 80.
I'm getting 80 by disabling any framelimits, partly in the nvidia control panel. And yes, the game is kinda screwed, but I did that for testing purposes (I don't always play like that).
teh_speleegn_polease Wrote:I didn't even need to check my rates, but just changing my GPU settings to Performance rather than Power Saving immediately gave me full speed 100% of the time at 4x IR and 8x CSAA.
The reason it was on power saving in the first place is because each revision is considered a separate application (which makes sense, since I don't replace the old revisions with new ones but rather add the new ones into a different directory). So even though I set it to performance mode a while ago, since then I updated a few times and forgot to change my settings again... So thanks for the help.
I'm probably gonna change my global settings to Performance, since I don't really care about power consumption.
That doesn't make sense to me. Just create a profile for dolphin.exe. Any settings you apply to it should be applied to every dolphin build you use. I have never had an issue with this and I use multiple dolphin builds in different directories just like you. Since the driver only looks at the file name and not the directory that it's in I don't even know how you could have possibly pulled this off.
teh_speleegn_polease Wrote:Or you can max out all kinds of AA in the Nvidia control panel, which would make a toaster crash while trying to render a textureless plain cube.
Not really. All of the AA methods included in nvcp are lightweight. MSAA, CSAA, FXAA, TRMSAA, and TRSSAA. At most you can expect a 50-75% drop in performance without transparency. And in most cases it's much less than that (25-50% for 8 samples). And none of them significantly increase vram usage. Now compare that to say 16xFSSSAA which will drop shader performance by 94% and cause your vram usage to explode.
(03-11-2014, 07:48 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]That doesn't make sense to me. Just create a profile for dolphin.exe. Any settings you apply to it should be applied to every dolphin build you use. I have never had an issue with this and I use multiple dolphin builds in different directories just like you. Since the driver only looks at the file name and not the directory that it's in I don't even know how you could have possibly pulled this off.
On my previous PC, it was the same. Now, ever since I got my new desktop, Dolphin isn't recognised by Nvidia. As such, I have to add the executable manually; so the file name is displayed as the full path (i.e. "E:/Dolphin Emulator/Revisions/[whatever revision is the latest I'm using]/Dolphin.exe"). This may have something to do with either storing the executables in a random location (a opposed to something generic like a subfolder of C:/Program Files), or storing them on a different drive (E: ), or just the control panel being a jerk and me not bothering to fix it because I don't care.
NaturalViolence Wrote:teh_speleegn_polease Wrote:Or you can max out all kinds of AA in the Nvidia control panel, which would make a toaster crash while trying to render a textureless plain cube.
Not really. All of the AA methods included in nvcp are lightweight. MSAA, CSAA, FXAA, TRMSAA, and TRSSAA. At most you can expect a 50-75% drop in performance without transparency. And in most cases it's much less than that (25-50% for 8 samples). And none of them significantly increase vram usage. Now compare that to say 16xFSSSAA which will drop shader performance by 94% and cause your vram usage to explode.
Oh, well at least I got 80-90 FPS. And on a barely OCed 680, I don't think that's bad.
Just use nvidia inspector if nvcp is giving you problems.
I'm not sure what is going on. I am experiencing worse performance that I should. I'm lost on this and tried everything I could think of, nothing seems to improve performance to where it should be. These are the specifications of the hardware I'm currently using..
Asrock G43Twins-FullHD motherboard (Socket LGA775)
Core2Duo E7500 @ 3.3 Ghz
EVGA Geforce GTX 460 Superclocked
4GB DDR3 1600 Ram
Windows 7 isn't listing the correct speed in the view basic information about your computer. The cpu is listed as an Intel® Core™2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93GHz 3.61GHz rather than 3.3GHz. The speed listed in CPU-Z is correct but it isn't maintaining a cosistent core speed of 3.3GHz and bus speed of 330MHz. My core speed is at 3281.01MHz and the bus speed is at 328.10MHz.
I'm going to be stuck with this PoS for the foreseeable future. No money, something that would have brought me additional income fell through and now I have people trying to get my money due to someone not doing their job three years back. -_-
So.....what's your question? I don't see anything about performance in here.
Xtreme2damax Wrote:The speed listed in CPU-Z is correct but it isn't maintaining a cosistent core speed of 3.3GHz and bus speed of 330MHz. My core speed is at 3281.01MHz and the bus speed is at 328.10MHz.
That sounds pretty normal. CPUs throttle based on load to save power. Even core 2 generation cpus. Try running something demanding in the background like dolphin.