Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Yeah , you should upgrade your CPU first . Phenom II was made 7 years ago ...
It's way below the Dolphin requirement . As you can see in the official Dolphin Benchmark here :
It's even slower than the Real Wii . While Phenom II finished the benchmark in 18 mins , i3 4130 @ 3.4GHz and G3258 finished the benchmark in 9 mins . While it's true that you can gain up to 50% speed if you upgrade your GPU :
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-dolphin-dx12-backend
66FPS -> 106FPS .
Your CPU is your main bottle neck . Upgrade CPU , you will gain 200->300% speed or even more than that

(02-27-2016, 12:15 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Phenom II was made 7 years ago ...

...and it's still kickin' (but it needs at least 3.5 GHz)

@SkiesForPies:
It *is* possible to achieve full speed even with that hardware.
What you need is a few tweaks and a different version of Dolphin.

1. Since you have relatively old hardware, you should try the unofficial build (Ishiiruka):
- The Direct3D11 backend in Ishiiruka works better with older GPUs. But Ishiiruka also has a legacy Direct3D9 backend for very old NVIDIA GPUs like yours.
- The latest development builds now have an EFB peek cache which speeds up CPU<->EFB reads (peeks), but Ishiiruka has a feature called Fast EFB Access which speeds up EFB writes (pokes) as well. Interestingly, Fast EFB Access got even faster with the merge of the EFB peek cache.

2. You're probably wondering why Dual Core isn't improving the performance for you. It's because you're still running Dolphin with SyncGPU enabled (read: SyncGPU is very slow).
- For a moderate speed boost, edit the Dolphin.ini file and change the SyncGPU Min. and Max. distance values from 200000 to 400000 like in this example:

Quote:SyncGpuMaxDistance = 400000
SyncGpuMinDistance = -400000

- For a much bigger speed boost (but with frequent resets as an annoying side effect), enable DualCore and disable SyncGPU. Like this:

Quote:[Core]
CPUThread = True
SyncGPU = False

At the beginning, you'll experience frequent resets, but as more shaders get cached to disk, the resets would occur less frequently. If you have the time and patience to build a "complete" shader cache (a huge number of shaders for every model, scene, effect and interaction) without ever updating to a new version of Dolphin, there should be no resets at all.

3. A mild CPU overclock from 3.2GHz to 3.5GHz (without increasing the voltage) is safe and it will give you a (much needed) performance boost.

4. Run Dolphin or Ishiiruka in portable mode to start with a fresh config.
For best performance, leave most of the settings at default. The only setting you'll have to change are these:
Disable VSync
Enable Borderless Fullscreen
Enable Fast EFB Access (only available in Ishiiruka)
Set the IR to 2x or 3x
No AA
1xAF
Per-pixel lighting OFF
HLE audio (fast)
XAudio2 backend
Set your GPU to run in high-performance mode (in the NVIDIA control panel).
Turn off the Aero Glass theme and effects in Windows 7 (switch to Aero Basic) to squeeze even more performance out of your old GPU.

Hmm I always thought my GPU was more of a problem then my CPU, but it appears not so. Good to know, in that case if I upgrade next time I will put focus on the CPU instead. Well then I didn´t pay too much for my CPU back then, but yeah I haven´t upgraded since 3-4 years, since so far except for morrowind(which is heavily moded and graphics enhanced like crazy) I never had any lags or problems.

Huh that is interesting, before I upgrade next time I will at least try to switch to Ishiiruka as it appears that it would be more compatible and faster with my current hardware. Thanks I will try that next.

That's probably because PC games and emulators do not have the same requirements: emulators like Dolphin are much more CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive. If you have a strong GPU but a weak CPU, your GPU will be bottlenecked by the CPU and you will not emulate at full speed. On the other hand, if you have a good CPU (like any recent, non-mobile Intel CPU) but only integrated graphics, you'll probably reach full speed (at 1xIR though).

Quote:Dolphin is a dual core application that relies upon IPC (Instructions Per Clock) for performance. Additional cores will not make Dolphin go any faster, though an “extra” core that Dolphin isn’t using may help slightly by keeping background tasks from using the same cores as Dolphin.

[...] The more powerful the graphics card, the more pixels and enhancements you can throw at it before you’ll see slowdown. However, the biggest thing to watch for is making sure the GPU supports DirectX11.1 and OpenGL 4.4. Dolphin emulates a console that functions very differently from a traditional PC, and uses the latest D3D and OGL features to reduce overhead. If you do not have those extensions, performance will suffer.

(https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq)

Okay I tried Ishiruka and it was worse then before for some reason.... Using pretty much the same settings resulted in not only a much worse picture, but even more lags and also crashes in some games like F-Zero GX.

I hence will go back to using the latest normal Dolphin version since this clearly works best.

However, for some reason now despite no change in settings trying to apply Ishiruka and then remove it crashed my normal Dolphin....

I get weird stretched artifacts now nonstop... I can´t play anything at all now and all attempts to normalize it again failed, all options are back to normal on my old(normal) Dolphin but I now for some unknown reason get weird stretched artifacts all the time... What the hell happened here and why doesn´t it go back to normal?

Seriously I should have never messed with Dolphin and just kept it at the settings I had which overall worked pretty good with only minimum lag. Anyone got any tips to get rid of these weird stretchings that I get now?

*Edit*

Nevermind got it fixed after some experimentation, was because of the OpenGL backend. Maybe I accidentally set it too OpenGL without noticing.... anyway got it fixed. So or so thanks for all the help. And the Ishiruka emulator for some reason continues to not work for me properly. Guess I will need a better CPU here. Then again from what I understand if the emulator could make use of a dual or best quadcore properly there wouldn´t be an issue in the first place. I have always questioned the use of duals or quads, oh well nothing I can do here other then focus on an upgrade in the next time.

Either GPU failure or driver issue is the cause of anti-fact . If you have the same issue with PC game , your GPU will fail soon

If you had read the FAQ or what I posted, you would have known that it's not a matter of using more cores. You just need a CPU with strong single thread performance, so a dual-core CPU like the G3258 will work much better than any AMD, as far as Dolphin is concerned.

A quad core will allow Dolphin to fully use 2 cores, as the background processes will be on the other cores. But you won't get a speedup by throwing more cores.