Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi,

I'm new to this forum but I tried to search a lot for explanations before posting this thread.

I have 2 systems:

A) Intel i7 2.8 (860) / ATI Radeon 4850M / 16GB

B) Intel i5 2.4 (4258u)/ intel Iris / 16GB

I'm able to play SMG2 almost at full speed (with a 2.x native resolution @fullscreen) with my B system that has less power !! And I have an FPS below 30 with the A system on native 1.x resolution windowed mode !!!!

*** For sure, some some levels are running slow, especially for "Grand Stars" as I need to use the DSP LLE recompiler to avoid crashes...

I'm using Windows 7 x64 on both systems, my drivers and Directx are up to date and I'm using exactly the same settings.
I'm really not able to play on my system A that as a 27inch screen, while I have a 13inch on system B

Can you please help me identifying what's going wrong ?
I have the same kind of behaviors with other games (zelda, super mario galaxy 1, mario kart...)

I'm running the latest Stable version (4.02 build: 2879c...) and tried to get back to 3.5 / development vesrions...

Thanks in advance for your help.

By the way, a great thanks to all Dolphin developers you made an outstanding job !!!!

PS: I tried to follow guide / recommendation and I tried many settings without success (Excepting with wireframe mode )

The i7 is a Nehalem chip and the i5 is a Haswell chip, they are several generations apart.

(06-20-2014, 07:19 AM)Link_to_the_past Wrote: [ -> ]The i7 is a Nehalem chip and the i5 is a Haswell chip, there are several generations apart.

Thanks for your answer.

Does it really explain a difference of 50% (playable and not playable !) ?

Then, another question, Does dolphin is using only the CPU and not the GPU?

Because I'm able to play Assassin creed 1-2-3 at full resolution (2560x1440) on the I7 system, but I'm not able to run it correctly at 1024x768 on the I5...

Thanks in advance.

(06-20-2014, 07:29 AM)hackar Wrote: [ -> ]Does dolphin is using only the CPU and not the GPU?

Mainly. Dolphin is more CPU dependent. On the contrary to PC games that are GPU dependent

So I'm stuck with my "old" i7
However, any tips on how to configure it to run some games with the minimum graphics quality at a FPS over 30 would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Sandy Bridge was notably faster than Nehalem for Dolphin when it came out (10~15%? I dunno, that was before I joined) and Haswell is 25~30% faster in Dolphin than Sandy Bridge. So it's actually not surprising that the i5 Haswell outperforms your older one. Intel has done a lot of work over the past few years to increase their single-threaded IPC.

Shonumi Wrote:Sandy Bridge was notably faster than Nehalem for Dolphin when it came out (10~15%? I dunno, that was before I joined)

It's way more than that. Sandy bridge was a huuuuuge boost for Dolphin.

Approximate numbers please. Not that I'm questioning you, I'm just want to know for myself. Like I said before, the days of Dolphin on Nehalem were before my time on the forums. By the time I made my first thread here, the 2500K and SB in general had been proven kings, but I never saw anyone talking about the boost in plain numbers (I assume I was just that late) though nowadays we talk about generational boosts constantly.

We talk about generational boosts so much because there's been an increase in how much worse AMD is in each generation, and comparing Intel generations to humiliate AMD users got really popular. Of course, NV really got it off the ground, like pretty much every hardware thing being spouted about the forums nowadays, and I guess it's a curse for him, because he also accidentally started a rumour about what makes what GPU better in Dolphin off the ground with mere speculation, and nobody's been able to stop talking about how bandwidth is such a massive factor in the determination of performance in Dolphin.

kinkinkijin Wrote:comparing Intel generations to humiliate AMD users got really popular.

I remember people doing that to educate users, not to humiliate them. We don't taunt people about the hardware they have, but we do question their decisions and try to help them make better decisions.

kinkinkijin Wrote:Of course, NV really got it off the ground, like pretty much every hardware thing being spouted about the forums nowadays

Actually, prolific talk of generational boosts (especially in hardware recommendation threads such as this) pretty much came about when first started doing benchmarks (the Wind Waker one in this forum) and we found out how fast Haswell was. If anyone recalls, NV actually predicted we wouldn't see a great or even notable improvement with Haswell (it was supposed to be another Ivy Bridge, e.g. ~5% better) With the benchmarks, we actually gained raw data regarding Dolphin performance across multiple Intel and AMD hardware generations.

@MaJoR - nvm, I'll just peek at the benchmark data we did, silly me :p