Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello all, I was just wondering how well I can run dolphin with these specs:

AMD Phenom II x6 1100T @ 3.30ghz
8GB RAM
GTX 550 Ti

Which games?

(12-01-2013, 01:38 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Which games?

Zelda twilight princess and the last story

Your CPU won't be fast enough for either game, although your GPU will do fine for 3x IR + various amounts of AA in most games. Ideally, you'll need thoroughly overclocked Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell CPU for either game. The Last Story is a very demanding game overall. Twilight Princess may require LLE audio (HLE audio "works" sometimes for some people) and even with HLE audio, Hyrule Field gets very demanding as the game progresses. Your current CPU may handle parts of LoZ:TP outside Hyrule field decently, however, but I imagine you'll still get slowdowns.

(12-01-2013, 02:27 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]Your CPU won't be fast enough for either game, although your GPU will do fine for 3x IR + various amounts of AA in most games. Ideally, you'll need thoroughly overclocked Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell CPU for either game. The Last Story is a very demanding game overall. Twilight Princess may require LLE audio (HLE audio "works" sometimes for some people) and even with HLE audio, Hyrule Field gets very demanding as the game progresses. Your current CPU may handle parts of LoZ:TP outside Hyrule field decently, however, but I imagine you'll still get slowdowns.

Thank you for the reply!

I disagree about TP. HLE works fine for TP and the game isn't that demanding with the exception of hyrule field and a few other places. If he overclocks that cpu it will be fine for TP. The last story on the other hand, not even close.

I disagree with your disagreeing. HLE works for some people, but doesn't always for everyone. For his CPU on stock on recent revisions, TP will be decent, but not fullspeed in areas outside of Hyrule Field. It'd take a hefty OC. I say this because I remember a handful of people noting that recent revisions even struggled with stock i5-3570Ks in places like Ordon Village.

Shonumi Wrote:I disagree with your disagreeing.

Don't start the loop! You'll kill us all!

Shonumi Wrote:HLE works for some people, but doesn't always for everyone. For his CPU on stock on recent revisions, TP will be decent, but not fullspeed in areas outside of Hyrule Field. It'd take a hefty OC. I say this because I remember a handful of people noting that recent revisions even struggled with stock i5-3570Ks in places like Ordon Village.

How can HLE work for some people and not for others? What would cause that? That doesn't seem possible.

I've seen people talk about minor issues with HLE like volume or music cutting out but I've never seen anyone say that it doesn't work at all for them.

TP has always been regarded as one of our lighter games overall. My Q6600 @ 3.2GHz ran it perfectly on dolphin 3.0 with the exception of a few places (ordon was one of them). And with the exception of hyrule field all of those places ran close enough to fullspeed for me to not care. I can't imagine that dolphin 4.0 is that much more demanding. The wiki testing entries show that it works fine with a stock 3570K and 2500K on 4.0. Unfortunately there are no entries for recent builds with lower end hardware.

If worst comes to worst he could always use an older release since there are no issues with older builds with this game.

(12-01-2013, 04:25 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]How can HLE work for some people and not for others? What would cause that? That doesn't seem possible.

I've seen people talk about minor issues with HLE like volume or music cutting out but I've never seen anyone say that it doesn't work at all for them.

You should know by now that some people never get issues whatsoever with problematic games with HLE audio's Zelda ucode implementation, for example, I have never had the need to use LLE audio for Wind Waker, ever, but LLE audio made its way into the .ini settings because so many people had sound-related issues (grey/black screens are technically audio related too since cutscenes rely on the DSP signaling certain sounds are done). There are enough variables floating around (Dolphin revision, OS, hardware, drivers, and what Dolphin is doing at any given moment) that what you experience can be totally different from what others have. Having the sound randomly go out or distort itself (the two worst things I've seen in this game) definitely constitute being "broken", just as much as we consider SMG 1 & 2 on HLE audio broken. Some people get away with HLE audio in this game; not everyone is that fortunate.

(12-01-2013, 04:25 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]TP has always been regarded as one of our lighter games overall. My Q6600 @ 3.2GHz ran it perfectly on dolphin 3.0 with the exception of a few places (ordon was one of them). And with the exception of hyrule field all of those places ran close enough to fullspeed for me to not care. I can't imagine that dolphin 4.0 is that much more demanding. The wiki testing entries show that it works fine with a stock 3570K and 2500K on 4.0. Unfortunately there are no entries for recent builds with lower end hardware.

Not all of those wiki entries (admittedly some of my earlier ones in fact) are experiences based on start-finish gameplay or at least prolonged gameplay over a majority of the game's length. I've seen enough people in Support asking why this game among others won't run well on their lower-end hardware to know that it's going to take a sizeable OC for the OP to be able to get decent speeds in this game. Even OC'ed to 4.1GHz, the Phenom II x6 1100T still manages to be behind a stock i5-2500K by some percentages (see the Wind Waker Benchmark).

I haven't seriously touched this game in a long time, but I can assure you that my i5-2500K @ stock gets some pretty noticeable slowdowns at various points in the game with 3.5 and 3.5-xxx builds (pre-GLSL merge), again outside of Hyrule Field. Faron Woods and Lake Hylia, for example drop to 20~23 FPS on me easily. These parts of the game do much better with the Vertex Streaming Hack in 4.0 (fullspeed basically) though massive drops resume without the VSH. With OpenGL, this game previously had nasty slowdowns for me, but it looks like that's changed. I'm unable to verify the Ordon slowdowns, but the Phenom II x6 1100T is still going to need quite a boost even discounting the VSH on OpenGL at least. I don't have all the time in the world to test these things, but I'm willing to bet I'll still get slowdowns in these areas on 4.0 with the VSH if I downclock my i5-2500K to roughly match the performance of a Phenom II x6 1100T @ 3.3GHz. I can't speak for Direct3D9 or Direct3D11 though.

(12-01-2013, 04:25 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]If worst comes to worst he could always use an older release since there are no issues with older builds with this game.

No issues with this game specifically doesn't eliminate general issues with Dolphin that are going to affect all games, however, like the annoying, hard to pin down 1:30 fuzzy audio issue that was around for the longest time. Users are free to use older builds, but we still have to remind them that old builds have issues that have since been fixed, even if some of those issues aren't game-specific. Not saying using an older build isn't sometimes the best option users face, just that it's not exactly a 100% cure-all.

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