I just thought I would continue this thread.
So far, I am pretty satisfied with the 4340, however, i frequently get dips that "feel" like disc caching. Are there any known limitations with dolphin and mechanical HDDs that cause this? Or am I just seeing the CPU choke, and it is not Disk I/O at all?
If Disk I/O is the problem, would SSD alleviate it?
The caching is most likely shader caching. The bottleneck with that is in the GPU, so no, a faster SSD would not give you noticeable gains. It would make loading and saving the shaders faster, but the dips are probably coming from the GPU when it actually has to generate them (before saving it anywhere). So to sum it up, disc I/O isn't the bottleneck.
Accessing an iso from a hard drive is far, far faster than using the Wii's DVD drive. You're likely experiencing shadercache issues. The first time any effect is used for a given object, Dolphin needs to design and compile a shader that will have the same effect. After this, it can use the shader it's already made, so as long as you stick to one Dolphin build, you'll find this stops happening as much as you progress through the game.
Is there anyway to alleviate/mitigate it? Lower IR? AA?
Pay someone else to run through the game a couple of times on your own computer before you play it yourself.
(09-02-2014, 08:30 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Pay someone else to run through the game a couple of times on your own computer before you play it yourself.
Would a video card upgrade from my Radeon 5750 alleviate/mitigate it? If so when selecting a gfx card for this specific problem, what are the most important factors to investigate? Core clockspeed? Memory speed? Memory capacity? I have a limited budget, and I am specifically wanting/hoping to address this issue. This PC is almost exclusively used for dolphin-emu.
It's not really something that can be got rid of completely. Pretty much any hardware configuration has this issue. It'll be less bad on more powerful hardware, but it won't be gone.
(09-04-2014, 09:04 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]It's not really something that can be got rid of completely. Pretty much any hardware configuration has this issue. It'll be less bad on more powerful hardware, but it won't be gone.
I know this is an old thread, but don't newer nvidia drivers help this by caching and saving shaders to your disk?
Dolphin does that anyway. It's the generation of the shaders in the first place that takes time, and no driver change can do much about that.
(09-17-2014, 06:31 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Dolphin does that anyway. It's the generation of the shaders in the first place that takes time, and no driver change can do much about that.
Yeah, just realized that after I posted.