There are many questions of whether or not someone's PC is fast enough to run dolphin.
Last week, I discovered that it doesn't take as much power as I thought.
I tested some gamecube and Wii games on the following CPU/GPU, connected to a 70" 1080p TV.
Celeron G1840 2.8ghz ($43)
EVGA GeForce GT610 2gb 810mhz 500mem ($50)
All other components were bare minimum.
Case was well cooled with 7 120mm fans running at full speed.
GPU has its own fan (consistently running at 100%) and included overclocking software.
I overclocked the GPU to 1100mhz and 600mem.
Here's what I found.
Gamecube---Tested 2 games
Mario Kart: Double Dash
Super Smash Bros Melee
----Both games ran at full speed at 2x
----Mario Kart stayed over 55fps at 2.5x
----Melee dropped below 50fps at 2.5x
CPU/GPU temps were great.
Wii---Tested 3 games
Mario Kart Wii
Super Smash Bros Brawl
New Super Mario Bros Wii
----All games stayed over 56fps at native
----All 3 games dropped below 50fps at 2x
CPU/GPU temps were great.
Conclusion.
This is probably all the power you need to play any gamecube game at native.
Those Wii games ran at full speed at native on a slightly overclocked Pentium G3258 ($65)
There you have it. a $65 Pentium and a $50 GT610 and Dolphin will work for you, at native res of coarse.
Hope those tests interested somebody.
GT 610? Might as well stay with integrated graphics. A GT 730 with GDDR5 would be way faster and only cost $10 more then you played for that GT 610.
Not worth the money you paid for . Let me do some maths for you
_GT 610 is basically trash (rebranded GT 520) . I can pick up a cheapest GTX 750 that has 5.7 times faster memory bandwidth but only cost twice as much . GTX 750 can handle up to 4xIR (2560x2112) while GT 610 can handle up to 1.5xIR (960x792) . GT 610 is based on the well-known power-eater "Fermi" architecture which is 2 generation behind GTX 750's "Maxwell" ( Fermi < Kepler < Maxwell)
_Haswell Celeron G1840 is ok but then again , it still not be a good bang for buck CPU . I rather choose Pentium 20th Anniversary G3258 (74$) instead .This Pentium is monster at overclocking . If you live in US , you can pick both Pentium G3258 + MSI Z97 motherboard at microcenter for only 100$ or even less . If you live in other country , you can pair it with Asrock B85 Anniversay and overclock it to 4.4GHz
The problem lies with the games you tested: they're all relatively lightweight games (except when you have more than one human playin Mario kart wii). But besides that scenario, those games will run fine at native resolution on almost any system. I think those get almost full speed in the Nvidia K1 on the Sheild tablet.
(12-21-2014, 02:23 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Not worth the money you paid for . Let me do some maths for you
_GT 610 is basically trash (rebranded GT 520) . I can pick up a cheapest GTX 750 that has 5.7 times faster memory bandwidth but only cost twice as much . GTX 750 can handle up to 4xIR (2560x2112) while GT 610 can handle up to 1.5xIR (960x792) . GT 610 is based on the well-known power-eater "Fermi" architecture which is 2 generation behind GTX 750's "Maxwell" ( Fermi < Kepler < Maxwell)
_Haswell Celeron G1840 is ok but then again , it still not be a good bang for buck CPU . I rather choose Pentium 20th Anniversary G3258 (74$) instead .This Pentium is monster at overclocking . If you live in US , you can pick both Pentium G3258 + MSI Z97 motherboard at microcenter for only 100$ or even less . If you live in other country , you can pair it with Asrock B85 Anniversay and overclock it to 4.4GHz
He already talked about the G3258.
DRJACK6 Wrote:Conclusion.
This is probably all the power you need to play any gamecube game at native.
This conclusion cannot be reached from the extremely limited sample size of your test. To claim that your rig is fast enough for
any game you would have to test
every GC game, not just a couple of them. The only conclusion that can be reached from your data is that your rig is sufficient for
some games since you only tested
some games. Which anyone here could have told you if you had asked about those specific games. So your results aren't particularly surprising to us. In fact if you click on the wiki entries for any of these games you'll find a pretty long list of users who have tested the game with different hardware. As a result of this data being widely available the community already has a pretty good idea of the requirements of most of the common games due to extensive user testing that has already been done. If you widen your testing to a larger list of games you'll quickly find that there are many GC (and wii) games that will run poorly on that hardware. Many will run well though (just not all of them) because celeron cpus from recent years are actually a pretty good choice for dolphin due to their high IPC and fairly high clock rate giving them good per-core performance at a low cost.
Asking if your hardware is "good enough for dolphin" is equivalent to asking if your hardware is "good enough for pc gaming". In both cases there is a wide range of games available over 10+ years that range from "even a toaster can run it" to "almost nothing can run it well". Since users asking this question often don't tell us which games they'll be running we assume the worst and try to stear them in the direction of hardware that will run pretty much anything they throw at it for a decent cost. So that they won't be disappointed and complain to us later if they decide to try out some of the more demanding games. The result is that if they end up only playing lightweight games their hardware will be much faster than it needs to be, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
(12-21-2014, 02:23 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]only cost twice as much
Just want to point out that there will be some people where twice as much is out of their price range, so while what you said IS a better deal and much better performance per dollar, it may not be feasible for people on an extreme budget.
Also, yes. More testing needs to be done with a lot of other games in order to come to a conclusion that it will run all Gamecube games at native full speed. Definitely interesting to see how much you can do with so little, though.
Like I said a GT 730 is $10 more but waaaay better.