Sorry if this question has been asked before, but is it possible currently with the latest Raspberry Pi to run Dolphin satisfactorily? Raspberry has been updated alot since 2012, and a quick look at the specs makes it look like it should be possible. Has anybody tried yet?
No , not even Snapdragon 801 @ 2.5GHz can run Dolphin at playable speed
Raspberry PI is a joke . It doesn't meet the minimum requirement (it doesn't support OpenGL ES 3.0)
The Nvidia Tegra K1 Dual core supercore 64bit version (not the slower/older Tegra K1 Quad core 32bit) will run Dolphin at playable speed
The Raspberry Pi would make a horrible candidate for Dolphin. It's a single-core ARM7 CPU that at most runs at 1GHz. Its GPU and CPU are far too old and weak even if you considered the Android or ARM version. Also, the RPi's CPU has not been upgraded at all over the course of all these years, and you won't likely see a major hardware upgrade to the RPi for years. It's a $30 ARM board originally meant for educational purposes after all.
How about an entry level Intel NUC? I was thinking of trying to put together an XMBC machine with a few emulators on too. Would an Intel Nuc do the job?
Those "crappy" Celerons are actually good for emulation up until Dolphin and PCSX2. They seem run PPSSPP well just fine. But yes, an entry level NUC is not enough. Gigabyte is the only vendor making NUC-like devices capable of running Dolphin. You'll still have to drop some cash into a decent computer.
Base on
antutu benchmark score , it's slower than my Snapdragon S2 @ 1.4GHz single core
I'm still using that processor atm (as a music player) . Gaming is out of the question ( Metal Slug Defense or light weight games like that can run ok , NES and Snes emu are ok on it too but N64 emu or higher requirement emu lags like hell)
Trust me, I've dealt with a quad-core Cortex A9 system @ 1.8GHz, and even that struggled with SNES and PSX emulation in Mednafen. A Cortex A7 is still slower than the A9 iirc. Realistically, the minimum ARM architecture that even begins to run Dolphin at more than a handful of FPS would probably be something with an A15, but even something like the ODROID-XU3 won't be very fast in Dolphin. I hear Nvidia's K1 Tegra or whatever offers amazing results though.
Like I said, you're not going to get acceptable results in Dolphin from low-cost ARM dev-boards. Believe me, I've tried playing less demanding emus on a range of ARM hardware. Either you're going to have to front the money for an expensive dev-board or ARM device, or you'll have to spend a few hundred dollars on new or upgraded PC hardware.