I made a post about six months ago regarding my specs at the time and whether they could adequately play Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and Xenoblade Chronicles at at least 2-2.5x native res. Following that post, I was able to successfully play the entirety of Xenoblade Chronicles with more than 95% reliability at about 3x native res. I tried playing Twilight Princess, but it slowed down to about 20fps when I reached the first Twilight realm in Faron Woods. I have yet to play Skyward Sword on my rig.
Since that post, I have upgraded my CPU from an i7 4700mq 2.4ghz to an i7 4910mq 2.9ghz. Also, there have been numerous core improvements in the emulator itself. I tested the beginning of Skyward Sword, and it plays fine at 2x native res (30fps), Xenoblade still plays the same, and Twilight Princess is barely improved.
Next year, I am planning on upgrading my GPU from a GeForce GTX 770m to either a 780m, 880m, or 980m, depending on how my research determines their compatibility with my hardware setup. I do know that the 770m is considerably more underpowered than the 780m and that the 780m is the most likely to be compatible with my system.
I am wondering, depending on which one I choose, would any of them have any impact on performance in Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword? Would I be able to play Skyward Sword normally at 2.5x instead of just 2x? Would Twilight Princess speed up at all?
Either way, I am still planning on upgrading so I can get better performance with my Steam games, but I do want to know if a GPU upgrade would have any significant impact on Dolphin performance.
When playing twilight princess on the latest builds, do you have the patch enabled under properties for TP? Because Faron woods is subjected to the slowdowns that are associated with the hurdle field slowdowns.
No, the 770m meets the minimum requirements, so upgrading the card only means you can go higher resolutions, since dolphin relies on the CPU to drive the games
I do use the latest dev build, but I'm not sure how to access the game properties...
Good to know about the GPU...I guess I'll just save some money and go for the 780m then...I was only going to go for the other two if the GPU also helped with Dolphin performance....I'd still like better performance with Steam though.
Thanks!
Right click on the game in the Dolphin list, go to properties, and under the patches tab, enable the Hyrul field patch
I have a Toshiba laptop with your old processor but only a 740M and 12GB of RAM that shipped with Windows 8.1. I'm not necessarily recommending that you do this, but after a few months with the laptop I got so tired of how it behaved that I just formatted the hard drive and started fresh with a clean install of Windows 7 x64. I noticed better performance system wide afterwards, especially in games. Toshiba seems to pack their stuff with bloatware(from my own personal experience) so starting fresh really helped me out. I can't do much AA, but aside from that I don't really run into slowdowns other than the ones that no hardware can currently fix. I also run a souped up, modded all to hell Skyrim on Ultra*(only 4x AA though) at 50+ FPS(usually close to 60, but you know, 740M lol).
Again, not necessarily recommending this(especially because I know how much of a pain the whole process is), just throwing in my two cents and experience with a similar laptop.
Super jealous of your stock hardware though.
(12-22-2014, 04:37 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Right click on the game in the Dolphin list, go to properties, and under the patches tab, enable the Hyrul field patch
Thanks! I did not know that. I had heard that the hack was enabled by default a few months back, so I did not realize it still needed to be checked.
Just tested on build 4800 and that added another 5fps at 2x native res, still not perfect, but much more acceptable.
I'm running at 3x in a 770m with an i7-4700mq and I get full speed (sometimes 99%) with the patch enabled.
Do you have the latest Nvidia drivers installed, 344.75, and are running on said GPU using Optimus properly? When you right click on the Dolphin.exe and go to "Run with graphics card", is it set to integrated or Nvidia?
My benchmark of using the title screen did improve to 100% at 2x, but the area it slows down at is in the Twilight Realm of Faron Woods. It used to run at 20fps at 2x, now it runs at 25fps at 2x during that part.
I do have the latest drivers installed, Optimus is on. I have it set to Integrated only because setting it to NVidia prompts an error message, though my NVidia global settings still forces it to use NVidia.
I also get error messages when I enable the hack, so I have to start the game with it disabled and then enable it while the game is running.
I have plenty of time to fine tune the settings, because I am not planning on playing the game on the emulator for at least 3-4 months pending the release of Majora's Mask 3D so I can have myself a little Zelda marathon. I'm hoping the emulator will also improve considerably in that time as well. I do appreciate all the help.
I went through my NVidia settings and also changed the program settings for Dolphin in addition to the existing global settings. That seemed to help...I can now play the same portions at 3x native res with antialiasing and all the other improvements enabled as well. Also updated to build 4803.
If you managed to fix it, just be warned that forcing enhancements through the driver will give error messages, and you need to set a specific profile for Dolphin if you haven't done so already.
This performance guide is also a good read:
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-un...ance-guide