Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey everyone,

Firstly, I'd just like to introduce myself as I've only just joined this forum moments ago

Secondly, the specs of my rig are as followed:

- Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
- ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Motherboard
- Hyperthreaded Intel i7-2600 @ 3.4ghz
- Nvidia Geforce GT 530 2GB
- 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz DDR3 Ram

From what I've read on the other hardware threads, these specs should be more than enough to run most games at an optimum speed with minimal lag, and for most of the games I'm running (eg. Luigi's Mansion, Animal Crossing, LOTR The Third Age, Zelda Windwaker) I can run them flawlessly,
until I tried running Gun this afternoon and it was barely reaching 30fps, and in populated areas dropping to around 20-25fps. The only thing i have i have tried is frame skipping, which instead of speeding things up, did the complete opposite and slowed it down to an irritating 12-15fps.
At this moment in time i have not altered any settings from default, I had a look on the Wiki to see if there were any noted issues or setting to change to increase performance but there aren't any thus far.

I'm wondering is there's anything i can do to get better FPS? is there any specific settings i should change? should i upgrade any of the hardware in my rig?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, Cheers in advance

Oh , Z68 mobo ...What a pity ! You paired a locked multiplier CPU with a mobo that support overclocking
The only way to make Dolphin run faster is either : upgrading CPU or making it run faster (overclocking)
Dolphin is a dual core application So Hyperthreading and multi-core CPUs are all useless
For Dolphin , high IPC / single threaded performance is required . The best combo for that would be i5 4670k (prefers : 4.2GHz or higher )+ MSI Z87 G45 atm

Thanks for the quick reply

So the issue is the locked CPU? How much would i need to overclock it if i was to choose that option? I personally haven't overclocked anything before though, and I'd assume I'd need better CPU cooling if i was to do so?

Quote:How much would i need to overclock it if i was to choose that option?

It depends on the game . For those very demanding games , your CPU stand no chance , overclock or not
In Dolphin Benchmark , Haswell is 30% faster than Ivy Bridge which is faster than your CPU (Sandy Bridge)
As you can see in that benchmark , latest Haswell i3 4130 stock speed 3.4GHz is equivalent to i5 3570k @ 4.4GHz which is way faster than i7 2600k @ 4.0GHz

Quote:and I'd assume I'd need better CPU cooling if i was to do so?

Of course , you would need that
CM Hyper 212 Evo and Arctic MX-4 are dust cheap and good enough for the job . Intel stock cooling is out of the question

(05-02-2014, 02:43 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Dolphin is a dual core application So Hyperthreading and multi-core CPUs are all useless

I am assuming you have tested both dualcore and quadcore CPUs on dolphin to make such claim? A quadcore with or without HT will always be superior than a dualcore no matter what you throws at it.

Yes I did
A Quad Core is 10-20% faster than a dual core due to background processing .

Quote:A quadcore with or without HT will always be superior than a dualcore no matter what you throws at it.

Depending on CPU clock speed . A Quad Core with low clock speed will run Dolphin slower than a high clock speed Dual Core
If a quad core truly performed like it should be , a 3.6GHz Dual Core shouldn't be much faster than a 2.6GHz Quad Core
Multi-core here I meant CPU that have more than 4 cores . Such as AMD 6000 / 8000 line , Intel 6 cores or the upcoming 8 cores Haswell