Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

My apologies in advance if this doesn't belong or fit well in the hardware section, but I believe it's heavily related to hardware.

As the title shows, I have a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop. I'm not precisely sure on the specs of it at the moment, when I'm done I'll run over to my laptop, get them, and edit my post here. But anyway, my main question is not really whether the hardware is "good enough" but what would give me the best performance out of the hardware.

As of right now it currently runs Windows 7 Pro and has ATI mobility graphics with 512 MB of VRAM. My goal is to be able to run some of the Mario Party games on it at least decently, specifically 4 and 5. I was running Mario Party 4 and it didn't seem that bad at all, but I'm striving to get the best out of it. I was wondering if I were to switch to a more lightweight Linux distribution such as Lubuntu, if that would help performance any.

However, being that it runs ATI graphics, I'd be weary of doing this due to crummy driver support I've heard so much about on Linux unless somebody could tell me otherwise.

That's my major consideration at the moment, however if there's anything else such as lowering the resolution of the screen or whatever else, I'd greatly appreciate any input that would help in running the games better. I clearly don't expect to run Twilight Princess or something, God no. My computer would commit suicide by baking itself to death trying that. Any information is greatly appreciated!

Mario Party 4 and 5 are light-weight (near average-weight when playing cinematics), so it shouldn´t give you lots of problems. Normally there are less problems on Windows, so you can keep it.

To post more details for your GPU use GPU-Z.

EDIT: I gave it a look on Dell´s website and it says it can support i5 and i7 CPUs. If you plan to play more demanding games (like Super Mario Galaxy) you could consider the i5-4670K.

Also, are you sure it has 512MB only? On the page it says it has 1GB.

@DJBarry:

A) It's a laptop. Those CPUs won't fit. You need to check this as this isn't the first time you've made this mistake.

B) Even if it wasn't a laptop, the probability that it would have the specific socket that chip needs isn't hugely high as it's a discontinued computer, so is unlikely to have shipped with a socket 1150 CPU.

C) You can't see the specs on Dells site as it's discontinued.

D) It doesn't support i5s or i7s because it's a Core 2 era laptop.

E) It does come with a 512MB GPU, the HD 3670M

F) Is there any more bullshit you're going to post, because you should try not posting it.

Woah woah, just looking for friendly advice here. But yeah, you got to that information quicker than I did, I didn't want to go off of any website because I know Dells often have model differences and I hadn't looked actual specifications in a long while as I'm mostly a desktop user.

But yes:

CPU: 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo
GPU: Mobility Radeon HD 3670 (512 MB VRAM)
RAM: 6 GB

DJBarry just has a tendency to post wrong things which go on to confuse people.

Anyway, for best performance, you might want to try the latest dev build and the settings in the best speed guide: https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/performance-guide/

(03-10-2014, 05:07 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Anyway, for best performance, you might want to try the latest dev build and the settings in the best speed guide: https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/performance-guide/

The performance guide is outdated for the latest dev builds though. It still shows a picture of the Hacked Buffer Upload, even though it mentions it by the Vertex Streaming Hack (it's newer name). What's more the Vertex Streaming Hack has since been removed.

At any rate, most of the defaults in any revision will give you decent speeds.

(03-10-2014, 03:20 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: [ -> ]Mario Party 4 and 5 are light-weight (near average-weight when playing cinematics), so it shouldn´t give you lots of problems. Normally there are less problems on Windows, so you can keep it.

To post more details for your GPU use GPU-Z.

EDIT: I gave it a look on Dell´s website and it says it can support i5 and i7 CPUs. If you plan to play more demanding games (like Super Mario Galaxy) you could consider the i5-4670K.

Also, are you sure it has 512MB only? On the page it says it has 1GB.

Last time you gave people wrong information you got a one week ban. Let's increase that to two weeks, shall we?

EDIT: To be clear, it's not about giving wrong information by mistake one or two times. It's about having more than 50% of his messages being completely wrong or unrelated to the problem, and having been warned at least 10 times about it.

Spirrwell Wrote:I was wondering if I were to switch to a more lightweight Linux distribution such as Lubuntu, if that would help performance any.

No. The only things you can really do to speed things up significantly are fiddling with settings (use the guide that has already been posted) and using an older build (which may introduce new issues). Which dolphin build are you using right now?