Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I am NOT a technological genius, I know little to nothing about hardware and software's intracate workings. I will start with that in the effort of honesty. I'm a fiddler. I can fix most mechanical problems I come across, and usually can fix computer/program problems by myself, by some googling, fiddling, and educated guesses towards function, however here's a problem I CANNOT solve, which I come to you good folk for help on;
I bought a PC off a friend recently, with what I am told are decent specifications, and over the weekend installed an Nvidia GTX770, which I'm told is a very good card, and which runs PC games incredibly well at maximum settings. Problem is, I can't seem to get it running well with emulators. At all. Namely I'm upset that I cannot run my GCN emulators, with basically the only game I want to play, Metroid Prime.

Running dolphin 3.5 in both 32 and 64 bit, and the latest release on the download page of 64bit 4.0 (http://www. shall not be named/download.html?lang=en) I get BAD framerates, running on default or low settings! My GPU monitoring software shows that the program is only using about HALF the cards total power!

My system specs are;

2 Intel Xeon E5430 2.33GHz quad core processors
8GB RAM, clock speed and brand unknown (But scored a 7.7 in windows experience index, so I assume it's decent)
and
a BRAND NEW Nvidia GTX770 manufactured by Asus (Its the only 770 they make, so I omit a long hard to memorize model number) clock speeds currently set at; 1111 mhz GPU, 1200 mV, 7010MHz Memory speed, and temperatures seem normal..
And windows 7 64 bit.
I will provide additional information as requested/needed.


This computer runs brand new/recent games (Batman Origins, Splinter Cell Blacklist, GRID 2, Dirt 3) at the absolute highest possible settings at 1080p and 60fps without a second thought, or any kind of frame rate drop or hesitation

What is going wrong?! I had this, and other emulators running games PERFECTLY on a friends seemingly inferior rig, with only a GTX 560!

What settings can I try? What do I do? It's quite disheartening, as emulating THIS GAME SPECIFICALLY was one of the major things I was excited with on this card, with aspirations of seeing it smooth and enhanced at higher resolutions...

The reason your friends "inferior" setup runs fine is because the issue is not (in this case) related to GPU speed but CPU speed. The issue is your slow CPU speed. Dolphin really only uses 2 cores and 2.3 GHz just isnt fast enough for alot of games at full speed (including Metroid Prime). Dolphin relies heavily on single thread/core performance which means you will need to heavily overclock/upgrade your CPU to something faster I'm afraid.

For Dolphin two very recommended CPU's are an overclocked i5 3570k or an i5 4570k if i'm correct

(11-05-2013, 06:46 AM)haddockd Wrote: [ -> ]The reason your friends "inferior" setup runs fine is because the issue is not (in this case) related to GPU speed but CPU speed. The issue is your slow CPU speed. Dolphin really only uses 2 cores and 2.3 GHz just isnt fast enough for alot of games at full speed (including Metroid Prime). Dolphin relies heavily on single thread/core performance which means you will need to heavily overclock/upgrade your CPU to something faster I'm afraid.

So basically, despite total power of my 2 quad core processors, I need more speed Per-Core, is that correct?

He was running an i5, I believe, and a mid-range one of similar clock speed.

Is there just some fundamental difference in a level of hardware architecture I'm not grasping? Would a board that supports this processor I have be able to upgrade to an i-series processor? The processor returned scores of 7.7 in the windows experience index, which in my limited knowledge I took as meaning it was pretty good..

such a shame..

Your mobo will determine your upgrade path if any. But yes, the per core speed is the bread and butter of Dolphin performance. To put it in perspective, I have an i5-2500K at 4.5 GHz and there are still come games I don't get full speed in. So you can imagine a 2.3 GHz processor has significant limitations.

I am not knocking your system in the least. I am hoping I am explaining why you are experiencing the issues you are well enough

(11-05-2013, 07:51 AM)haddockd Wrote: [ -> ]Your mobo will determine your upgrade path if any. But yes, the per core speed is the bread and butter of Dolphin performance. To put it in perspective, I have an i5-2500K at 4.5 GHz and there are still come games I don't get full speed in. So you can imagine a 2.3 GHz processor has significant limitations.

I am not knocking your system in the least. I am hoping I am explaining why you are experiencing the issues you are well enough

No, I appreciate the help!
No insult taken. I'm trying to learn how all these things work anyway. it explains why PCSX2 is giving me trouble also, as a few games I KNOW ran for his computer are behaving similarly for me as well...
In the meantime, it's running modern games like breeze. It's a shame for me at least, that emulators are apparently set up in such a single-core dependent way. Are there any plans to code for full utilization of processors which would help people like me, or you with the i5 which only runs dolphin on 1-2 cores?
How do I go about figuring out what my board is and upgrade options? The computer was a Dell Precision TS400 according to the case...

That system is better off doing a multi-threaded workload like video compression or even a server. The Harpertown is basically a server chip (most desktops don't need 12MB L2 cache) and having two of them does not typically match the workload of most software running on desktop systems.

It is not likely that Dolphin or any other emulator of a system like it will ever use more than two threads, since that's what the hardware it is emulating does in terms of process. That's simply a design limitation of the emulated systems, combined with the difficulty and performance overhead of breaking the work of a single process into multiple parallel jobs. I wouldn't expect that to change. Single process performance is king in legacy system emulation.

I would see if you can sell this to someone who needs a lower-end server or put it to use elsewhere and build yourself a proper system for Dolphin. It will run your PC games just as well or better. That GTX770 can definitely make the trip to your new rig though.

supraman97 Wrote:Is there just some fundamental difference in a level of hardware architecture I'm not grasping?

Several.

For one the microarchitectures are completely different. A 2.3GHz conroe core is much slower than a 2.3GHz haswell core. Haswell being a far more modern and efficient architecture is easily capable of producing twice the performance. Add to that the concept of software threading which others have partially explained so I won't bother elaborating here. It really comes down to singlethreaded performance though. So you have the gist of it.

supraman97 Wrote:In the meantime, it's running modern games like breeze. It's a shame for me at least, that emulators are apparently set up in such a single-core dependent way.

Not just that. They're more CPU dependent whereas PC games are more GPU dependent. This is the reason why a system with a better GPU will perform better with PC games but worse with emulators. As you have just experienced first hand.

supraman97 Wrote:How do I go about figuring out what my board is and upgrade options? The computer was a Dell Precision TS400 according to the case...

It's an old server so don't bother. That architecture is far too old to run dolphin well even with the fastest cpu models available. Plus server cpus are optimized for multithreaded workloads anyways since most server software is heavily multithreaded.

rokclimb15 Wrote:It is not likely that Dolphin or any other emulator of a system like it will ever use more than two threads, since that's what the hardware it is emulating does in terms of process. That's simply a design limitation of the emulated systems, combined with the difficulty and performance overhead of breaking the work of a single process into multiple parallel jobs. I wouldn't expect that to change. Single process performance is king in legacy system emulation.

It really is flat out impossible. Not just difficult. You cannot emulate a single cpu thread with multiple threads. The synchronization will kill any performance benefit.

Basically everything that NaturalViolence said. Just because you have 2 CPUs will not give you better speed as Dolphin will only look at 2 cores at any time. Your per-core performance is lower than even a first gen i3.
See if you can sell that rig to someone who needs it. Take that money to go buy a cheap tower with a Haswell i5 w/ no GPU, and carry over your GTX 770 like rokclimb15 said.

(11-05-2013, 12:35 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

supraman97 Wrote:Is there just some fundamental difference in a level of hardware architecture I'm not grasping?

Several.

For one the microarchitectures are completely different. A 2.3GHz conroe core is much slower than a 2.3GHz haswell core. Haswell being a far more modern and efficient architecture is easily capable of producing twice the performance. Add to that the concept of software threading which others have partially explained so I won't bother elaborating here. It really comes down to singlethreaded performance though. So you have the gist of it.

supraman97 Wrote:In the meantime, it's running modern games like breeze. It's a shame for me at least, that emulators are apparently set up in such a single-core dependent way.

Not just that. They're more CPU dependent whereas PC games are more GPU dependent. This is the reason why a system with a better GPU will perform better with PC games but worse with emulators. As you have just experienced first hand.

supraman97 Wrote:How do I go about figuring out what my board is and upgrade options? The computer was a Dell Precision TS400 according to the case...

It's an old server so don't bother. That architecture is far too old to run dolphin well even with the fastest cpu models available. Plus server cpus are optimized for multithreaded workloads anyways since most server software is heavily multithreaded.

rokclimb15 Wrote:It is not likely that Dolphin or any other emulator of a system like it will ever use more than two threads, since that's what the hardware it is emulating does in terms of process. That's simply a design limitation of the emulated systems, combined with the difficulty and performance overhead of breaking the work of a single process into multiple parallel jobs. I wouldn't expect that to change. Single process performance is king in legacy system emulation.

It really is flat out impossible. Not just difficult. You cannot emulate a single cpu thread with multiple threads. The synchronization will kill any performance benefit.

Thanks everyone, this has all been very insightful. As I said, I'm a mostly mechanical man. I can figure out how cars and appliances work, and fix those kinds of things, but I'm basically stabbing at the dark in the computer realm. Everything I know is on a VERY basic level.

My friend sold me this tower for ~350 bucks, so I don't consider it a huge loss or deception or disappointment, as PC gaming WAS my primary and intended use... And the fact that you can barely get an ultra-low end computer from any store for that (as I've just done for school...)

I might have to start researching and delving around to build a properly powerful rig.. Being a college student on my own, it'd take me a while to get the scratch for this endevor, so it'd have to be something that would stay respectable for at least a few years before it starts becoming obsolete.. Maybe one that can hold the 770 I have, and another eventually?


Anyone have some decent resources to share with me at this end?
I'm guessing I'd basically need a board that supports an I5 or better (I7 is one of the best currently, isn't it?), the processor itself, at least 8GB of some new RAM, since I seem to recall something about this RAM different in something per my friend(from what I understand DDR3 is the standard, whatever it means, and that there's now DDR5 which is faster?), at least an 800 watt power supply, and a case that fits it, at which point I just need to figure out how to wire it all up, and drop my 770 in it? Shouldn't need a sound card, since the 770 does it via HDMI, and I use it in the livingroom...