Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Picking one up this week and curious what people are experiencing.

Well based on the specs we can give you an estimate. The CPU is a Xeon V2 CPU, which is an Ivy Bridge era CPU. It will operate at a similar level to the i5-3570K at 3.5 GHz or 3.7 GHz (depending on what model you bought, 4- or 6-core respectively), since Dolphin will only use two cores. It will be slower than a Haswell i3, but you should still see good performance. Don't expect to be able to play the most demanding games though.

HOWEVER, if you can wait for the refresh of the Mac Pro with the Xeon V3 CPU, its a Haswell based CPU and will give around 30% better speed in Dolphin clock-for-clock compared to the current Mac Pro

So having the extra cores will actually hinder the performance? Good to know! it seems like the apple computers are poop for using Dolphin. All the 2-core processor units have lower end video cards and all the units with better video cards have more than 2 cores.

Build your own PC , you will save a lot of money . OEM PC's manufacturer are thieves and robbers who will rip your pocket off
If you want to install OSX then just build a hackintosh PC
The 3 best CPU for Dolphin is : Pentium Anniversary G3258 @ 4.7GHz , i5 4690k @ 4.7GHz and i7 4790k @ 4.7GHz
The Pentium cost only $74 . If you live near Microcenter Store , you can get both G3258 and MSI Z97 mobo bundle for only $100
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-20...hw-canucks

I'm not too concerned with the cost. I'm getting the Mac Pro regardless. But I will prolly built a hackintosh for Dolphin. I was just assuming that the extra cores would just be neutral and not hinder the speed. Anyone using hackintosh? If so, does it function properly?

Quote: I was just assuming that the extra cores would just be neutral and not hinder the speed

Not really , quad core CPU is up to 20% faster than dual core CPU in Dolphin . That's true for StarCraft 2 which is also a dual core application (Tested setup are dual core mobile i7 Sandy Bridge and quad core mobile i7 SB , the dual core i7 is clocked 100MHz higher but it performs worse than Quad i7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlCF5Am3oao

So the previous poster was incorrect? I'm so confused lol

He is correct too . Quad core is faster than dual core in Dolphin as long as both CPUs are from the same generation . However , Xeon V2 is Ivy Bridge CPU which is 1 generation older than the latest Haswell Xeon V3
Haswell is much faster than Ivy Bridge in Dolphin .
i3 4130 @ 3.4GHz = i5 3570k @ 4.4GHz = i7 3770k @ 4.4GHz
See official Dolphin Benchmark
The reason why Quad Core is faster :
_Dolphin is a dual core application which means it will take full advantage of dual core CPU
_However , your OS and background processing units need CPU horse power to run . If Dolphin used 100% of your CPU horse power then there would be nothing left for your OS . If you want Dolphin to use 100% , you will need extra core for background processing / OS ...

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Because Dolphin is only a dual core program, it only uses 2 cores. The faster those cores, the faster Dolphin plays. The reason the i3 haswell will beat the Xeon v2 is because haswell is 30% clock for clock compared to Ivy bridge CPUs (Xeon v2). The extra cores won't decrease performance, it's just that the 2 cores on the Xeon aren't as strong as the 2 cores in the i3 haswell.

Why go hackintosh for a dedicated build? Windows will give you access to the D3D blackens and Xaudio2, which means exclusive full screen (there's a protype for OpenGL, but it's not quite there yet, and I don't know if it works on osx)

Edit: ninja'd

(09-04-2014, 12:45 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: I was just assuming that the extra cores would just be neutral and not hinder the speed

Not really , quad core CPU is up to 20% faster than dual core CPU in Dolphin . That's true for StarCraft 2 which is also a dual core application (Tested setup are dual core mobile i7 Sandy Bridge and quad core mobile i7 SB , the dual core i7 is clocked 100MHz higher but it performs worse than Quad i7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlCF5Am3oao

Thats because the Dual core i7's are just rebranded dual core i'5s