Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello!

So if some random Android phone emulators aren't taken into count, I just started experimenting with this whole emulation and all the things related to it. I'm not much of a pro with it but I do have a slight grasp on things.

For the question: I have an AMD Fx-6350 as my CPU, is it any good for emulation? I've been trying to fiddle with some settings on the Dolphin but I do get some slight game speed drops on occasions. I've only emulated Harvest Moon: Magical Melody and Twilight Princess. The first runs just smoothly, not much going on it anyhow. But the Twilight Princess' gamespeed and fps dropped to half after I entered the Lost Woods I think, it being an large-ish open area. I tried fiddling with some settings but it didn't give any more than 18 fps (this is the GC copy of the game).

Hmm, I think I would rephrase that question as "Am I going to run into similiar issues/is it a settings issue?" I hope this makes sense

- Sitru

Dolphin only uses 2 cores, 3 if you have LLE on separate thread.
The FX-6350 has low per-core speeds compared to Intel chips. You will want to look into overclocking if you can.

Currently running the CPU with 4,44 GHz, the stock being 3,9 GHz. I'm not quite familiar with the structure of the Dolphin yet, but is it possible to assign the tasks to multiple cores?

The GC is a single core console. The Wii had 2 cores. To split those emulated cores up over more cores in the emulator would require a major overhaul to the emulator, and would not give any significant gains in speed.
So the only option is to just have a faster CPU. The FX-6xxx has really low per-core speeds, as I said earlier. Even with your overclock, it will still struggle in some games. Have you put your computer into high-performance mode under power management? Also, try using the OpenGL backend with the vertex streaming hack enabled.

(12-03-2013, 03:38 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]The GC is a single core console. The Wii had 2 cores.

Uh, care to elaborate? I've never heard of this

(12-03-2013, 03:38 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Have you put your computer into high-performance mode under power management? Also, try using the OpenGL backend with the vertex streaming hack enabled.

I checked and my computer is running on the most powerful settings on every possible driver setup. Guess it's as high of a performance I can get with my CPU then.

AMD isn't as fast as Intel clock-per-clock. This means that an AMD CPU running at 3GHz will still be slower than an Intel CPU running at 3GHz. In other words, if you plan to maintain your AMD CPU, you'll have to overclock much more...

ExtremeDude2, thanks for pointing that out. The GC has one processing core that gets split into two core in Dolphin. I always thought for some reason that the Wii already had two cores, but its only a single core....

(12-03-2013, 06:01 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]ExtremeDude2, thanks for pointing that out. The GC has one processing core that gets split into two core in Dolphin. I always thought for some reason that the Wii already had two cores, but its only a single core....

I may be wrong, but this is just doesn't make sense for me: as far as I know, both GameCube and Wii have a single core CPU, and Dolphin only uses two cores because one of them is emulating the CPU and the other is emulating the GPU (a third core is used by Dolphin to emulate DSP if you're using LLE with DSP on Thread option). The first multicore PPC CPU used by Nintendo is on Wii U, which have a tri-core CPU (accordingly to the leaked specs)...

You're correct Jhonn. And that should be common knowledge by now. A simple google search will confirm it.