I'm going to bring up some testing I did to entirely void a certain thread.
Latest dev revision is the fastest if your graphics card supports D3D10 and/or OGL 3.3.
Even if it doesn't, there's the D3D9 branch, which is often updated to fit the current master.
(06-23-2014, 07:37 AM)Boondock Saint Wrote: [ -> ]Well as I said already, dolphin 4.0 runs games horribly slow on my pc
Then it's not our problem. As Shonumi said before, here in the forums we only support the latest stable release (4.0.2 at the moment) and the latest development build... You can use any older version you want (and that's what many people with systems that doesn't fulfit Dolphin requirements choose to do), but if it isn't one of the supported releases, you have to deal with any possible issue by yourself. Also, the feature you're asking is broken in the old builds but it works perfectly fine in any current build (4.0-xxxx), so, it's up to you if you want to fix that...
And to finish, older builds are faster because they have a lot of bugs and doesn't emulate many things. Current builds may be slower but the're accurate and most of these bugs are fixed, and in most cases of emulation scene, accuracy is what matters (see bsnes/Higan for example)...
As I've already said.
The latest revisions are the fastest.
I actually lazy-benchmarked this.
Do not use old revisions.
Are they actually faster than the famous r6xxx versions that supposedly will run any of the games they're compatible with on a toaster? I'd be really surprised if we'd managed to get that far.
Well, just did a quick benchmark here with 4.0-1941 and the old r6515 and no, current dev builds aren't faster, but they're veeeeeeeeery close to the old ones (YAY!). I tested Zelda TP, Zelda WW and SSBM with frame limit disabled, and the speeds are almost the same in Zelda TP and SSBM, around 90-100 FPS from the spots I tested (roughly 3-4 FPS difference between old r6515 and current version). The same for Wind Waker, but in the room where you fight Ganondorf Puppets (before last battle), r6515 is faster than current builds, a difference of around 15-20 FPS in this room (r6515 doesn't emulate many things, hence the boost)...
I used EFB to Texture in both (making sure the EFB setting weren't being overridden by the game INI), in r6515 I was using DX9 and in current build I was using OpenGL (and for some reason VSync is always enabled with OpenGL, so force disabled VSync in driver settings to produce comparable results)...
In other words, current Dolphin builds are veeeeeery close to the old r6515 regarding speed, and I'm sure that in next milestone (Dolphin 4.5, Dolphin 5.0, whatever) we're going to break that barrier and r6515 won't be the "fastest" build anymore =D
Jhonn: Your results about mirror mine; it really depends on game. CPU limited games (the vast minority) will be much faster in latest builds. GPU limited games will be somewhat slower in a lot of cases due to actually emulating things + integer support + doing things right.
Example of GPU limited games?
Wind Waker seems to be one, same with Twilight Princess.
Wind Waker is not GPU limited except during raining in my testing.
For GPU limited I would cite Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, all Metroid games and perhaps Donkey Kong Country Returns and the heavy JRPGs (Xenoblade/The Last History)?