Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Actually, the point is to play GC/Wii games on PS4. Dolphin probably won't support more than 2 cores. I don't know if DSPLLE on Separate Thread really works but it doesn't work for me for every game I have tried. It seems that Dolphin still uses only 2 cores with that option checked. Maybe it works only with some games.

Xeno Aura Wrote:It depends whether the PS4 version could be made to use more than 2 cores. Seeing as the PS4 has 8 cores running potentially up to 2.75GHz. (I know this isn't easy, there's a reason Dolphin doesn't use 4 cores yet I guess.)

Getting Dolphin to effectively emulate the GC/Wii with more than three major threads has been an eternal pipe dream since forever :p https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldnt-dolphin-use-more-my-cpu-cores-go-faster

In a nutshell, very unlikely to happen due to the nature of what's being emulated.

Xeno Aura Wrote:Also the PS4 and XBO CPU's are custom-built, they're not your average Jaguar CPU. For a start, Jaguar CPU's only support 4 cores, whereas the PS4 has 8 cores.

That doesn't change the fact that the single-threaded IPC is going to be too low to run many games in Dolphin at fullspeed. Again, that's the case with all of AMD's current CPUs; they need high clocks or heavy overclocking to reach fullspeed in many games.

The Phenom II CPU's seem to handle Dolphin pretty well, my 965 can run most games at 100% speed, and lower powered games like Mario Party 4-7 generally run above 100FPS. Although I'm not sure what are high-powered games to run, and I don't touch Wii emulation.

But I think the general consensus is don't wait around for Dolphin on the PS4, just get a good PC to run it instead.

(09-30-2013, 11:27 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]

' Wrote:Yes, easily, it's equivalent to a medium spec PC at the moment, so it'll run most Dolphin games at max speed.

Very doubtful actually. Dolphin relies heavily on single-threaded performance, where AMD's current CPUs don't particularly shine. To put things into perspective, not even their latest FX CPUs can run a lot of Dolphin games fullspeed without high clock rates (e.g. 4.0 GHz and above). Even then, many of the more demanding games won't run fullspeed despite heavy overclocking. Unless AMD put some amazing "whizz bang" effort into their engineering, the Jaguar CPU inside the PS4 probably won't be ideal for Dolphin.

To put things further into perspective, there isn't a single CPU of any architecture made by any vendor clocked at 2.0 GHz that will run a majority of games on Dolphin fullspeed. Even a Haswell CPU (Haswells are currently the highest performing CPUs for Dolphin atm) at 2.0 GHz is far too low to play all but a handful of games fullspeed. CPU-wise, the PS4 is pretty comparable to a very low-spec PC for Dolphin.

Most games aren't the last story, or mario galaxy

I can run a handful of games okay on the 2.2 ghz 3 core phenom II in my laptop. I'm sure plenty of games would run fine on a ps4.

In this thread: People who don't read benchmarks before talking about performance.

xxballerxx54 Wrote:you guys are making dolphin on android and u might say no but can you make it on consoles like ps4 or xbox one. ps4 is more powerfil and cheaper so just wondering. wont hurt my feeling if u say no since i already have it on pc but just wondering.

For the love of god fix your spelling!

xxballerxx54 Wrote:ya its orbis i think

No. That's the codename of the system prototype.

DJBarry004 Wrote:Does the P.S. 4 has an O.S.?

Of course. How else is it supposed to do anything? It even has a main menu.

Xeno Aura Wrote:Can it run Dolphin in terms of Hardware? Yes, easily, it's equivalent to a medium spec PC at the moment, so it'll run most Dolphin games at max speed.

Not even close. Its cpu will run dolphin much slower than the vast majority of laptops let alone desktops. It is barely faster than a netbook in terms of singlethreaded cpu performance. There are very few games that would run at tolerable speeds on it.

xxballerxx54 Wrote:actually it has 8 cores and lol dolphin only uses 2 and its cpu is over 2.75ghz and it will have turbo core.

Do you even know how turbocore works? It's a dithering PLL system. The actual clock rate will be closer to 2GHz. Combine that with the piss poor IPC of a jaguar core and almost nothing is going to run at tolerable performance. In 1 or 2 years smartphones will have single/dual threaded performance on par with it. There almost there now.

DJBarry004 Wrote:If your request would be possible, the PS4 could at least open Dolphin. I say at least because AMD CPUs usually are slower than Intel ones, and in demanding games is a miracle to hit acceptable speeds.

It's not a really a matter of Intel vs. AMD. The specific microarchitecture being compared is far more important to the comparison.

DJBarry004 Wrote:The max power for the AMD Jaguar is 2.0 GHz, so don´t even expect playable experience in Dolphin.

GHz is not a measurement of speed or performance.

Xeno Aura Wrote:It depends whether the PS4 version could be made to use more than 2 cores.

As the developers have said over and over and over again the answer is no. It's not possible to make dolphin use more than 3 cores effectively without breaking the most fundamental laws of mathematics and logic.

Xeno Aura Wrote:Also the PS4 and XBO CPU's are custom-built, they're not your average Jaguar CPU.

All jaguar cores are completely identical whether they are in a laptop, netbook, smartphone, game console, or any other device.

Xeno Aura Wrote:For a start, Jaguar CPU's only support 4 cores, whereas the PS4 has 8 cores.

Jaguar is the name of the core microarchitecture. Not the CPU/APU. As far as I know they haven't given this chip a name yet. The CPU side of the chip is basically the same as netbook APU except with 8 cores instead of 4. Which won't boost dolphins performance at all. Current jaguar benchmark results are abysmal compared to the higher power architectures. The only reason is would be any faster than a $250 netbook is the higher clock rate. These cores are designed to be small and low power. Not fast.

The fact that their choice of hardware this time around is so similar to a PC makes a direct comparison surprisingly easy. Expect the PS4 to have CPU performance similar to a netbook when 1-4 cores are in use. Expect it to have CPU performance similar to a low end laptop when 5-8 cores are in use. GPU performance is what they put their emphasis on. Most of the die area and power consumption of the APU is from the GPU side. GPU wise it is equivalent to an upper midrange desktop discrete GPU. For a video game that's good but for an emulator cpu performance is what really matters. And that's where they skimped. You can understand why they made that design tradeoff since this device is designed to play video games, not run emulators.

Xeno Aura Wrote:The Phenom II CPU's seem to handle Dolphin pretty well, my 965 can run most games at 100% speed, and lower powered games like Mario Party 4-7 generally run above 100FPS. Although I'm not sure what are high-powered games to run, and I don't touch Wii emulation.

Your phenom II 965 is massively faster in lightly threaded performance. Twice the operating clock rate and at least 10-20% higher IPC .

RachelB Wrote:I can run a handful of games okay on the 2.2 ghz 3 core phenom II in my laptop.

Which is still faster than what the PS4 has.

RachelB Wrote:I'm sure plenty of games would run fine on a ps4.

Not a chance in hell. See above. Then go read some jaguar benchmarks. We don't have jaguar benchmarks in the WW CPU benchmark but we do have a bobcat user. And his results were pretty awful. Considering jaguar is 20-30% faster than bobcat in the best case scenario that does not bode well.

Worth remember that comparing PC and PS4 specs isn't a great idea.

The PS4 has a lot less background programs to run, and can dedicate more resources to applications than PC's can.

I would love to see a 2GHz CPU and an AMD HD7770 run any game seen running on a PS4. This means Dolphin would need optimizing for the PS4's hardware, but don't compare the PS4 with a netbook.

PS4's specs is disappointing compared to PS3's and PS2's at their time. It mightn't be that bad, however, if the game developers utilize 8 cores of the CPU. It's surely not an ideal platform to run an emulator that mainly uses 2 cores.

Xeno Aura Wrote:The PS4 has a lot less background programs to run, and can dedicate more resources to applications than PC's can.

Which has almost no effect on performance. Background tasks on a typical PC use less than 5% of total cpu cycles per second under the worst case scenario. And they are automatically delegated to the 4th core which dolphin doesn't use (assuming you have a quad core cpu). Running a linux distro and cutting out all non essential background tasks has a less than 2% impact on performance in dolphin. This has been the case for a decade now. Typical background tasks do not have a significant effect on PC application performance on modern systems.

Xeno Aura Wrote:I would love to see a 2GHz CPU and an AMD HD7770 run any game seen running on a PS4.

Those games don't exist yet. And they will likely be highly multithreaded which current PC games and dolphin aren't. So your comparison doesn't make any sense.

And even so there are still many modern games that don't need very much cpu throughput and can run well on such a setup. Especially at the lower framerates and resolutions that many PS4 games are targeting. The PS4s GPU is faster than a 7770 and has memory and API optimizations not present in PC systems which will improve its GPU performance further. So that's not really a fair comparison on the GPU side either. A dual core desktop haswell i3 or quad core FX 4300 combined with an HD 7870 GHz edition overclocked (or underclocked 7950) would be a better comparison to the PS4s cpu and gpu throughput if you're looking at desktops.

Xeno Aura Wrote:This means Dolphin would need optimizing for the PS4's hardware,

The only optimization that would allow an application like dolphin to run well on the PS4s hardware would be extensive multithreading. Which we already know can't be done because the GC/Wii only have 3 microprocessors to emulate.

Xeno Aura Wrote:but don't compare the PS4 with a netbook.

Xeno Aura Wrote:Worth remember that comparing PC and PS4 specs isn't a great idea.

Why not? They have the exact same microarchitecture. That and clock rate are the only factors that significantly impact dolphins cpu side performance which is the primary bottleneck in almost all modern PCs. When two devices use the same architecture you can easily and accurately predict the performance of one using benchmarks from the other. It's just math. You can compare the same software running on the same hardware architecture but you can't compare different software running on the same hardware architecture. Which is why you can't use future games with different workloads than dolphin for a comparison.

Nothing can be done to make a 2GHz jaguar core perform anywhere near a 4GHz haswell core which is about 4 times as fast in most workloads. HUMA, mantle, and HSA could be used to boost the performance of the video thread in dolphin but not by anywhere near enough to make up for that kind of a difference in per core cpu performance. Even if the video and dsp threads were optimized to the point where they literally did no work at all it still wouldn't be anywhere near as fast as current dolphin builds running on a typical modern desktop.

(10-01-2013, 05:03 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Xeno Aura Wrote:It depends whether the PS4 version could be made to use more than 2 cores.

As the developers have said over and over and over again the answer is no. It's not possible to make dolphin use more than 3 cores effectively without breaking the most fundamental laws of mathematics and logic.

Technically, if we got a really advanced AI (think skynet or cortana), it could read in a game, work out what every algorithm did, and use its near infinite intelligence to work out new algorithms which could be run on more than one thread and still produce the same result. Of course, this would be ultra-high level emulation, and skips past static recompilation over to making an exact port of the game, so isn't really emulation either. It also assumes that the result would be more than a few percent faster, and that by the time we have this level of AI, we won't be able to use quantum computing to run an electron-by-electron simulation of a wii, and that we won't have the compute ability to run dolphin on a budget system.

Go out and get yourself and a laptop with a A6-5200 in it, like this, then underclock it to ~1.8GHz.
Alright, now install FreeBSD on it and try to run Dolphin on it. Great, there's your theoretical benchmark.
Now get a PS4, hack it, and find a way to patch Orbis OS so that you can run a Dynarec.
You're almost there... now simply rewrite the OGL backend from Dolphin to make use of PSGL - or whatever they're going with for PS4.