Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So after years of trying to get hardware that can catch up with this beast of a program, I've finally decided to build my personal single GPU monster.

CPU: i7-4770k
GPU: EVGA GTX 780SC ACX 3GB
Cooler: Corsair Hydro H80i Liquid Cooler
Board: GA-Z87-HD3
RAM: Crucial 8GB 4x2 D3 1600 DIMM CL9
Windows 8.1 64Bit Home
Arctic Silver Thermal Paste applied in shop to CPU

My goal was effectively 2 extremes...

1. Run Watch Dogs on Ultra day 1 (and I get a free copy with the GPU to boot!), and run PS4 equivilant games on ultra for awhile, with GPU upgrade being a possibility 'eventually'.
2. Push Dolphin to the absolute limit and get some of the most demanding (but playable) games up to, or as close to full speed as possible (excluding games that blatantly don't work like Rogue Leader).

And yes, I know that some overclocking will be needed. The 4770k and cooler were the most important purchases (that I could afford) for that reason. I'd considered waiting for the 4790k, but decided the unknown release date and sales prices were tempting enough to justify the purchase, and the 4670 and 4770 have been heavily praised here.

Yet I still want to hear direct feedback.

Will this machine perform as well as I'm hoping? Will I get the Prime Trilogy, Twilight Princess, and MAYBE even Last Story up to full speed, or will Dolphin soon be slaughtering my wallet with new inefficiencies as we play a zero sum game? I'm not worried about LLE since we have a more or less working Zelda Ucode, but will I finally be able to play my Marios, Zeldas, and Metroids with the speed I have long dreamed of?

What clockspeeds should I aim for to get some of the most demanding titles to full speed, and what (Stable) games still can't reach it, if any?

I've invested a lot of dreams and funds into this build. I'm hoping it pays off.

First off all, Arctic Silver is old and no one should use it anymore.

Anyways, that is a pretty good rig you have there. You want to overclock that to around 4.2Ghz - 4.4Ghz to play most games at fullspeed. Be aware that nothing currently can play The Last Story on fullspeed, it even lags on a real Wii

Arctic Silver is just riding on hype from when it was the best around nowadays. You can get more effective carbon pastes now that don't cost a crapload, don't need to be cured, aren't poisonous, and don't conduct electricity.

But what you have is pretty much the best you can have for Dolphin, barring a similar build with an R9 295X2 (rolled out XDMA for it, don't know if XDMA actually gives a bandwidth speedup, also contending with Titan Black for fastest GPU in existence, but keep in mind that I only mention a crossfire card because of my preemptive speculation that XDMA might be usable to increase memory bandwidth, and Dolphin doesn't actually use both GPUs), and that build (and aforementioned similar build) with some overclocking.

1500$ for a single GPU is out of my price range (500 alone is the most I've ever spent on one in this build), and I question whether an R9 is going to have that much of a GPU advantage over the 780 in Dolphin (as it was said that the 780, ti, and Titan have integer calculation on par with AMD, and recent driver updates have produced some notable speedups in even my old rig). I'm also confident that the ACX cooler will help compared to other versions of this card.

But good to see my build is on par for what this program demands. I'm curious what programs will still 'not' run full speed... and I'm hoping they are few and far between for once. From the few comments I've seen, even TP at least gets 'close' when the 4770k is overclocked. I also hope I don't regret not waiting on the 4970k, but reviews so far seem good.

And considering I would've otherwise gotten stock, I hope Artcic Silver 5 is at least still a decent Haswell cooler... The addition was only 8$, and it's being professionally applied at the local MicroCenter. I trust the techs there pretty thoroughly as they've not served us wrong in the 15 years we've shopped there.

Either way, the build should be ready by midweek, and that free watch dogs copy helped save me a bit too.

Well, the GPUs are good enough that getting better doesn't really matter.

AS5 is professionally applied at Micro Center because Micro Center also doesn't carry a good selection of PSUs, and people are under the general assumption that AS5 is still the best there is. Including professionals, for those under that assumption. It's largely talented consumers, extremely knowledgeable professionals, and actual reviewers who realize the difference. That, and it's not the "average joe" (intelligent human being who works at a store) who chooses what products they use. It's the higher-ups, who are largely idiots who will make that intelligent person who actually knows a good product do what advertises better, or gets more sponsorship/bribe money for the company, without taking into account whether the product is extremely dangerous or not.

Fair point. Having worked electronics retail for several years myself, I can certainly understand the corporate influence.

Ultimately, I'm just curious about what people have benched with this kind of tech here in the more demanding titles.

Guess I'll find out in a few days.

For those who are curious, I've been able to bench a number of demanding titles now.

Galaxy 1 and 2 are full speed, even on stock, thanks to no longer needing to rely on LLE. There may be occaisional stutter, but when OCed to 4.2GHZ, they don't even do that.

Prime trilogy runs full speed with minor stutter on stock, and very slight slowdowns in some spots with the scanning visor where there's a lot on screen. Only in Prime 3. OCing to 4.2GHZ again removes even the stuttering, but again a very tiny bit of slowdown remain with the visor in areas with a lot to render.

I can only get Hyrule Field in TP to 15FPS at best even when OCed to 4.2GHZ on HLE. So far, I have also failed to OC the processor any further with stability that doesn't cause temps to spike to 90c+ Seems like I'm stuck with one of the so-so haswells, but that's fine. I have a feeling optimizations will come to both the Gigabyte bios and Dolphin itself eventually. There has already been much performance improvement this past year.

Still, overall, Haswell is definitely a step up. Anything currently playable below these titles runs full speed so far, though I've yet to try Last Story. I look forward to future results, and much more forward to what this thing can do with non-emulated games.