Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Well, there's that tearing bug that showed up a while ago, and they got rid of for 14.4, for example, that affects windows. Or 14.3 beta's erratic behaviour on trying to force VSync. Otherwise, in a single-GPU, non-eyefinity, windows environment, there aren't really too many issues that the user has to worry about. Developers, sure, but not the user.

okay..thanks for the replies..so which GPU should I take?
will I see any difference in dolphin b/w those two as r7 265 is more powerful?

I'd say to get the r7 if you're not recording, or the 750Ti if you are.

You can also record with AMD GPUs. It's probably not as 'good' or stable as ShadowPlay (yet). It's developed by a regular guy and not AMD.
I've tried it out and it's pretty good. I actually had a tough time finding a game where I couldn't record it without dropping frames, but luckily we have horrible ports such as Oblivion to test things on.

It's called OpenEncodeVFW.

So which GPUs/APU's are supported?
You can find a list on AMDs blog here.
Here's a picture of it which will get out of date at some point.


What do I need?
- Recording software that allows you to set up your own codecs such as DXtory and MSI Afterburner
- OpenEncodeVFW

How do I set it up?
- Download the ZIP and extract it somewhere.
- Run install.bat with administrator rights.
- Open up your recording software and choose OpenEncodeVFW Encoder using Amd APP/VCE as the codec and configure it

Don't go too crazy with the settings. Here's what I'm using as a reference with my R9 280X. I haven't tweaked it yet, but the results are pretty good already.

thanks a lot..then I think I will go with the r7 265 ^^

Good to know that there's a thing that would be extremely helpful to me that I'm missing out on because I don't yet have money flowing from my ears.

(04-27-2014, 02:46 PM)Garteal Wrote: [ -> ]...

You can also use Intel Quicksync if you have a modern i5/i7 using MSI Afterburner.
Only works with DX11/DX9 Applications, but works very, very good with no performance loss at all.

According to the latest article on the Dolphin home page, nvidia cards got a major performance hit (plus some bugs) with the switch to an integer based graphics pipeline in the latest Dolphin releases, while AMD cards got a speed boost and better accuracy. So in that case, AMD cards are now way superior for emulating Gamecube, even though most games don't have that kind of gap.

For what it's worth, that article made me choose an R7 260x over a 750ti. The 750ti is both faster and more power efficient in most things, but Dolphin seems to now be heavily weighted towards AMD cards. Dolphin easily runs best in OpenGL mode (way smoother than D3D), and is faster in OpenGL mode, with similar performance to the old DX9 mode but a smoother framerate with less hitches.

As far as the drivers go, there's no reason to worry about AMD drivers if you're on Windows. On Linux, the drivers aren't completely horrible, but they are worse than Windows, and AMD has a tendency to drop driver support after a few years, which is really bad on Linux.

BTW, the latest AMD drivers (Catalyst 14.4) support OpenGL 4.4 too, but the most important feature for Dolphin was already supported through AMD's pinned memory extension way before it was supported on nvidia and OpenGL 4.4.

In personal experience, going from an nvidia card to an AMD card, AMD has more tearing with vsync off than nvidia does, and doesn't seem to acknowledge Dolphin's vsync in OpenGL. But you can set vsync and triple buffering through their driver control panel, which is sufficient.

The only issue with people going to AMD is the abysmal driver support for Linux compared to Nvidia

And the ever-so-subpar drivers in windows, don't forget that.