Hi,
Apologies for yet another "is my PC good enough" thread but I'm somewhat confused as to how to improve my hardware (preferably at the lowest cost) for Dolphin and other emulators.
I've been happily surprised how well games play - cut scenes aren't great and some games are a bit jerky, but I wasn't expecting to be able to emulate much at all, but currently playing the likes of Mario Kart, Mario Strikers and Lego Star Wars really well.
It would be good however to improve the performance and I'm wondering what the easiest hardware upgrade would be and I'm assuming either CPU or GPU. I have an 1155 socket motherboard and didn't really want to upgrade that, but it has an i3-3220 processer, so there could be an upgrade there. From the Unofficial Benchmark thread (which has been useful) there doesn't seem to be many 3rd gen chips and even the i7-3770 is fairly low down compared to the others, so I'm wondering whether this would be much of an upgrade?
The alternative (not sure I can afford both straight away) would be a dedicated graphics card - I've always used the integrated Intel graphics - would this see much of an improvement? And as it's not something I've looked into, any recommendations for this (I guess it largely depends on budget!)?
Many thanks for any assistance
If you upgrade the cpu, you will have to overclock it in order to get a big performance improvement for Dolphin. And overclockable cpus need a mainboard that supports overclocking.
Does your mainboard support overclocking?
- If not, then the only option to upgrade the cpu(with Dolphin in mind) without replacing the mainboard, would be an i5 cpu, with about the same performance as your cpu, but with 4 instead of 2 cores + HT(hyper threading). This would give you max a 20-30% performance improvement as far as i heard, possibly less, because that number is from 2 vs 4 cores, and not 2+HT vs 4 cores.
- If the mainboard supports overlocking and you want a cheap solution, then it's clear that you want to get a G3258(Pentium Anniversary Edition), and overclock it to 4.x Ghz. In terms of some PC games, this might even be a step backwards, as HT seems to be working pretty well on some PC games. A clear, but also expensive, upgrade would be to an i5 4690K, also overlocked to 4.x Ghz.
Or you wait for at least the new broadwell cpus, or maybe even the skylake cpus, which are supposed to be released somewhen this autumn.
But let's take this one step back. What do you want to play? And what is not playing at full speed currently? Before deciding anything, you should find out what the bottleneck is. If you upgrade the wrong part, nothing changes. If you got a dedicated GPU, you could crank up the IR(internal resolution) to something like 3xIR(really good for full hd). A dedicated GPU might also improve the performance at 1xIR, but i can't really tell you, i don't know anything about that.
Finding the bottleneck is difficult if you can't over or underlock either CPU or GPU. You can't use the cpu or gpu load to determine which one is the bottleneck, both values are bogus to some degree. Well, if one of both is at a constant 100% load, then it's likely that it's the bottleneck, but it's not guaranteed. If you could underlock the cpu, while not underlocking the gpu, you could test if the emulation gets slower by this. If it does by the same % that you underclocked, then you are most likely cpu limited.
Oh crap, nevermind what i said about cpu upgrades. I didn't know that there's socket 1155 and 1150. You can't put a G3258 on a 1155 mainboard.
I'd vote for the GPU here. Even low cost GPUs are able to generate higher resolution than those intel GPUs. But more important, their driver is usually better (or for nvidia, much better). But it depends on the game if the GPU driver matters. So through you just change the GPU, the CPU overhead of the driver (which may be a critical part of the runtime) is affected.
Some games however are likely even slower with a dedicated GPU because of the higher latency.
So same question as from mimimi: Which games don't run fast enough?
For the GPU itself, mid-range but up-to-date generation is to be prefered. Don't trust game benchmarks for older GPUs, we use them in another way.
Thanks for your replies mimimi; yeah, if I don't upgrade my motherboard I'm limited to the 3rd gen chips. My motherboard (Asus P8H77-Pro-M) does support overclocking, but this is not something I've done before and feel a little wary of it to be honest - just the unknown I guess.
In terms of games, I think the games that will most often be played will be the previously mentioned Mario Kart, Striker, Lego Star Wars. Mario Sunshine and Metroid Prime play but with slurred speech, so it would be good if those could be better.
Thanks for your reply degasus - do you have a preferred make for mid range GPU's?
Cheers
well if you can get a hold of an i5 3570k probably the best bang for buck range processor for your mainboard that would be a nice upgrade for emulator and pc games. Please note that the 1155 mainboard is discontinued so finding the processor brand new might not be easy.
For graphics best mid range I would recommend is an Nvidia GTX 960 or if you want to budget a little bit more the 750Ti is still a pretty good option. I don't recommend people AMD graphics cards cause I hate them but thats my own personal opinion and some people might recommend AMD cards for you.
Haswell is 30% faster than Ivy Bridge in Dolphin Benchmark . So it's pretty pointless to purchase an i5 3570k and his mobo won't be good enough to deliver true power of a "K"CPU . Pentium G3258 @ 4.6GHz + Z97 mobo can bring the performance of i7 4790k @ 4.4GHz for Dolphin . I recommend G3258
I have decent iGPU (iGPU HD 4600 and APU HD 8670D) but when i upgrade it to a cheap GTX 750 , everything change ....Games just run better and better
Btw HD 4600 is almost twice as fast as HD 4000 (i3 3320)
Thanks for the advice guys, I think I'm going to go for a 750ti card for the time being and then upgrade the mobo and processor as and when I can.
Slightly different subject - as mentioned most of the games we want to play work fine (Lego Star Wars, Mario Kart Double Dash etc...) but we have this slight issue that if we start Lego Star Wars via Kodi/XBMC we can complete a level and start a new one, but during that second level Dolphin will always crash. I can't remember the message it brought up unfortunately. It doesn't crash if we just start the game via Dolphin. I'm assuming its crashing because Kodi is still running in the background and either the PC is running out or memory or simply can't handle it all, but wondered if anyone new a more exact diagnosis.
It's no massive problem, but would be nice to be able to utilise both programs if I can.
Many thanks
(06-03-2015, 10:17 PM)buff Wrote: [ -> ]Do you have a preferred cheap mid range GPU?
If you prefer NVIDIA, get the GTX 750Ti.
If you prefer AMD, get the R7 265 or the R9 270 non-X (recommended).