Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm currently looking at the following components for the new gaming/multimedia rig i'm building:

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-Bit
Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming G1-Wifi BK
Intel Core i7-4790K 4.00GHz (Devil's Canyon) Socket LGA1150 (oc'd)
GTX 980, likely to get 2 in sli...we'll see
Corsair Dominator PLATINUM 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17100C9 2133MHz Quad/Dual Channel
OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD
Noctua NH-D15 Dual Radiator Quiet CPU Cooler with two NH-A15 Fans
IC Diamond 24-Carat Thermal Compound (4.8g) (x2)

This will be hooked up to either a 27" 2560x1440 144hz monitor as well as a 50" 4k lcd, depending on the type of game being played. Of course dolphin as well as other console emulators will be played on the 4k but I am unsure of what performance to expect given my obsession with forcing as much graphical improvement as I possibly can, I'm talking 4x, 5x, maybe 6x? ir, AA, the works! Can I expect 60fps from a 780ti? And while you're here feel free to suggest changes to the list. Budget is virtually unlimited so anything that gives me a better general gaming experience is appreciated. I'm going all out on this one.

Unlimited budget has it's benefits so i don't think you will have a problem with 4k gaming, although the sli with dolphin won't be used. There were reports of having no issue with 4x internal with a worse card than yours, and since 4K is not much higher resolution than 4x in dolphin i don't think you will have an issue.

A single 780 TI will easily handle 4K resolutions with dolphin. 4K with no AA is equivalent to 6x IR or 3x IR + 4xSSAA. As long as you stick to MSAA you'll probably still be ok even with AA on.

Are your monitors/TV hdmi 2.0? It is my understanding that you need version 2.0 in order to get 4k at 60 fps. If the hdmi is 1.4 then 4k is limited to 30 fps.

Displayport (more common right now) will also support 4K at 60 Hz.

4k really isn't hard to do in Dolphin which is really weird. Does anyone know why 4k isn't really demanding in Dolphin?

Quad 780TI in SLI? Wow. I presume you'll be wanting to do some hardcore PC gaming on that? As pointed about you'll only be using one of those in Dolphin. No thought about waiting for the GTX 980 out very soon, which promises some performance bump (yet to be quantified, possibly slight only) as well as lower power requirements and heat output?

I'll be building a similar rig for 4K myself, but since I'm not much of a PC gamer a single graphics card will be just fine for my needs.

I would use the 980 honestly. Less heat to deal with.

EDIT: Just saw SLI. Honestly Xfire is better then SLI this gen. XDMA really helped with that along with the frame pacing drivers AMD released.

(09-16-2014, 11:00 AM)DatKid20 Wrote: [ -> ]4k really isn't hard to do in Dolphin which is really weird. Does anyone know why 4k isn't really demanding in Dolphin?

It's quite possible that Dolphin simply isn't pushing out as much graphical detail as you think it is, that is to say people are overestimating just how much it takes to do 4K with games designed on HW that's almost a decade old (more than a decade if you specifically point out the GC). Sure games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime, and Xenoblade Chronicles look good in HD and at 4K, but under the hood, is what Dolphin does to the GPU in fact "demanding"? Perhaps it just looks demanding onscreen or on paper.

I dunno, this is just me talking, and not much else.

(09-16-2014, 11:30 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]

(09-16-2014, 11:00 AM)DatKid20 Wrote: [ -> ]4k really isn't hard to do in Dolphin which is really weird. Does anyone know why 4k isn't really demanding in Dolphin?

It's quite possible that Dolphin simply isn't pushing out as much graphical detail as you think it is, that is to say people are overestimating just how much it takes to do 4K with games designed on HW that's almost a decade old (more than a decade if you specifically point out the GC). Sure games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime, and Xenoblade Chronicles look good in HD and at 4K, but under the hood, is what Dolphin does to the GPU in fact "demanding"? Perhaps it just looks demanding onscreen or on paper.

I dunno, this is just me talking, and not much else.

This is so true on so many diffrent levels...

i do know what your getting at...

Remember the wii is not a modern pc game and or modern hardware.. Pushing 4k on your pc to play wii games is not really that gpu intensive as apposed to a pc game... There is diffrent factors that play in 4k gameing or even 1080p gameing then just gpu power or cpu power..

One you have to look at base resolution of game and screen complexity of the whats being displayed on screen.
The wii's native resolution at the time was 480i enhanced provided you used component video..

also remember increasing resolution just effects gpu load while changing frame rate effects cpu load..

increasing resolution just changes how many pixels are needed on screen to render the target image while the cpu still needs to do the caculations to render x frames @ target resolution.

The "frame time" is the time it takes to execute a single frame, and is generally expressed in milliseconds. At 30 fps, developers have one-thirtieth of a second, or 33.33 milliseconds, to render each frame. Doubling the frame rate to 60 fps cuts the frame time in half to one-sixtieth of a second, or 16.67 milliseconds. It takes time to render everything on the screen — objects, particle effects like explosions, visual effects like antialiasing and more — so whatever the target frame rate is, the total rendering time can't exceed the corresponding frame time.

to factor how much vram you would need for the wii game there is 2 ways to do this 1 would be to be at internal IR and calculate your desktop resoultion.

height x width = pixel's per screen

devide by bit (your color bit) ÷ (half color bit) = (how many bits per pixel make up the color)

take devided number times pixel screen = total bit-rate you need to make up screen now x that by your target frame rate= Total gpu vram needed to make up screen minus complexity.. (not all scenes are the same..)


the second way to do this is use step 1 to figure out your vram then you will need to do this again for target IR rendering because your target IR is different then your screens own pixel count.. pretty much its going to be 2 3 4 x the amount you calculated for 1x ir

This is just for a console game it gets alot more complex with pc games.. As diffrent games have different screen complexities different style shadier effects different target fps so on.

TLDR Consoles even tho might be harder to emulate then a pc game are not as GPU heavy as they are CPU heavy..

Also note if you plan on doing 4k gameing with 4way sli i suggest to use 3 in sli and the 4th as a dedicated phsyx card..

Note the number you get is going to be for 1 frame... so you need to multiply your total end number x 30 frames or 60 frames per second thats the total VRam needed over a 30 frame time or 60 frame time.