Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

My best guess is your windows 7 build has not been properly updated and is using an oudated thread scheduler. Make sure windows 7 is completely up to date and install these hotfixes just in case:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594

Also make sure your UEFI/BIOS is up to date. Dolphin relies on OS thread scheduling and if the OS decides to use two cores from the same module on an fx cpu is will hurt performance. Windows 7 should fix this automatically if it's up to date. Windows 8 and higher have it right out of the box and don't require updates to fix it. Linux has had it fixed for longer than windows has. Pretty much since bulldozer first released. If you're using an up to date version of linux mint that's likely why it's running faster.

And yeah stated your cpu is better than something else because of passmark or WEI scores will get you laughed at in most communities because they are notoriously unrelaible as a means of benchmarking. It also shows that the user thinks that if a cpu is faster than another in one application that it will be faster in all applications. Which is of course completely false. What's more important is the performance of that cpu in the specific applications that you're trying to run. In this case dolphin. The biggest issue in this case is that both WEI and passmark evaluate multicore integer performance. Which bulldozer excels at since it has 8 cores with 2 ALUs each. So an 8 core bulldozer cpu performs twice as well as a similar 4 core cpu. However dolphin only uses 2 cores, like many applications. And as such a cpu with faster cores will significantly outperform one with more slower cores. That is why the i5 is recommended and not FX cpus. Because in dolphin it is much faster than FX cpus. This has been proven repeatedly through empirical testing (user benchmarks). I understand that you don't want to talk about this but it needs to be said so that you don't make the same mistake in future situations. For the record PC games also run better on an i5.

i am aware that passmark is not a good way to say it is better but i didn't really want to go through all the specs and ect. because i don't think it's the problem. it has strong points and weak points and depends on lots of factors so it's not possible to rate it with one general over all rating. anyway linux is up to date and so is my bios. windows is NOT up to date and i actually thought of this but didn't notice it was so out of date until i actually took the time to check just now.

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i'll update and report performance when i'm done.

it is up to date now the problem isn't fixed. it actually got worse after installing the hot fixes for some reason.

What dolphin builds have you tried?
Can we see your settings?
Have you checked to make sure that your cpu and gpu are not throttling?
Are you absolutely sure your dolphin settings are exactly the same in both linux and windows?
Does this happen with all games? What games have you tried?

Dolphin capitalizes on faster single thread performance, which means Intel CPUs are just vastly superior for Dolphin. And this is true for gaming in general for any heavily CPU related games that aren't heavily multithreaded. You got some games like Crysis 3, and Battlefield 3 & 4 where AMD CPUs actually get good performance on, because those games are multithreaded heavily. An 8 core CPU isn't gonna do any good if the program you're running is only going to use 2 of those cores. I've seen benchmarks where even Intel I3 dual cores are rofl stomping flagship AMD CPUs in gaming. All the I3 is just a dual core version of the I5, same architecture.

Intel is so far ahead of AMD in CPU architecture, its not even funny.

(01-25-2014, 12:13 AM)chaosblade02 Wrote: [ -> ]Dolphin capitalizes on faster single thread performance, which means Intel CPUs are just vastly superior for Dolphin. And this is true for gaming in general for any heavily CPU related games that aren't heavily multithreaded. You got some games like Crysis 3, and Battlefield 3 & 4 where AMD CPUs actually get good performance on, because those games are multithreaded heavily. An 8 core CPU isn't gonna do any good if the program you're running is only going to use 2 of those cores. I've seen benchmarks where even Intel I3 dual cores are rofl stomping flagship AMD CPUs in gaming. All the I3 is just a dual core version of the I5, same architecture.

Intel is so far ahead of AMD in CPU architecture, its not even funny.

Thank you for saying what we've said a million times before as if it's the first time it's been said.

Continuing what Natural Violence has repeated and I've said explicitly, could you give us screenshots of your settings? There's the possibility of a setting you don't remember changing that's causing all of this.

EDIT: There's also the chance that your PSU is giving a bad signal bad enough to cause serious performance spikes. It happened to me when my "good" (better than fire hazard) PSU exploded and I had to switch to my current one. In fact, I could get you a playability difference right now, to show you just how bad a PSU bottleneck can be. But, please tell us your PSU, as well. I (and others) can find if a power supply expert like jonnyguru explicitly dissed it, and, if so, recommend a better power supply for you. NOTE: I say this because this is something that doesn't seem to be an issue for me when I use Ubuntu (though, through ubuntu still performs badly on my system for other reasons), but is a massive issue when I use windows.

PSUs cannot effect performance. It's impossible. Current and voltage are not directly related to any specs. that effect performance including clock rates. If your PSU is insufficient it can cause instability but it cannot reduce performance.

What games are you trying to play? Also, post your video settings.

After reading this, i went to check out my sisters AMD 955 phenom PC with a 560 ti and it ran most games at 3x resolution just fine at stock settings.
that bulldozer must be some serious piece of crap.
for future references you might want to use something like anandtech instead of Passmark to determine what cpu is faster core for core next time mate.

Raziel Wrote:for future references you might want to use something like anandtech instead of Passmark to determine what cpu is faster core for core next time mate.

No. One has no clue how Dolphin works, so its results are of limited meaning. The other has never done an article trying to compare CPUs for Dolphin.

We have two benchmark threads. People would be wise to read them and make decisions from Dolphin-based tests to determine Dolphin-based performance.

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker-cpu-benchmark
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-new-dolphin-cpu-benchmark-no-game-required