Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Dolphin proves to be a very strange program. In particular, video games typically require a better GPU than CPU for the best performance whereas dolphin is the opposite. Is there a similar oddity for memory speed? Plenty of sources around the internet suggest that memory speed doesn't affect performance too much in anything because higher RAM speed sacrifices latency (for example, here: http://lifehacker.com/when-ram-speed-mat...1436679680). Has anyone done any tests with this or is there even any concern for bottlenecks?

Also, here's the build I'm planning: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/kGZKJx

Memory speed is pretty much irrelevant for most applications, including Dolphin.

The only time it would matter is if you have to run an AMD APU or Intel iGPU and then you want the fastest RAM possible as it's also acting as VRAM. Then it provides a reasonable boost in framerate for a lot of games.

I don't think your 9400m uses system memory for vram, so memory speed doesn't matter for you.

EDIT: Your build is pretty good. I would go with 2x4GB RAM so you can get dual channel though, pretty sure the cost is the same. As for your GPU, how soon do you need to build this system? nvidia is releasing the 1070 and 1080 that will replace the 970 and 980 in June. The new 1070 will be $349 and is stated by nvidia to be as powerful as the Titan X. (I'm iffy because PR people are being rather vague about numbers and the numbers they did throw out were for VR, but you get it. REALLY FAST)

Thanks for responding!

I chose to go with 1x8GB instead of 2x4GB because it's $11 cheaper, it provides room to upgrade to 32 GB (on a 4-slot mobo) instead of 16 GB, and the improvement of dual channel over single channel is small for typical applications. There's a big improvement for certain computation intense tasks like compression/decompression, but I'm willing to tolerate the slow down.

I'm going to try to buy a 970 off ebay on the cheap. The 1070 is too overpowered for my needs and is more expensive.

Eh yeah. the 9xx series will be a hell of a lot cheaper used now with the 10xx series coming out.

(05-15-2016, 02:30 PM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]Memory speed is pretty much irrelevant for most applications, including Dolphin.

The only time it would matter is if you have to run an AMD APU or Intel iGPU and then you want the fastest RAM possible as it's also acting as VRAM. Then it provides a reasonable boost in framerate for a lot of games.

would this scenario apply to my Intel NUC 5i7RYH? I think the GPU and CPU share ram on this machine, so I'm wondering about anything I can do to speed it up. Would getting faster ram help me? Also does Dolphin allocate a set amount of RAM or is the sky the limit?

You would probably benefit from faster RAM, yes. Check to see the ram speeds your motherboard supports. As for how much faster, I don't know. You'll have to turn to google for that.

Only APU benefits from faster RAM frequency . The higher Ram frequency , the more memory bandwidth your APU will have (tested on my A10 6790k )
Intel HD iGPU is totally different . It doesn't matter if you use higher RAM frequency or not , your memory bandwidth won't change .

Why would the iGPU be different? If it's using system ram as vram, faster ram is faster vram, right?

Idk , from what I tested : Corsair Vengeance 1333 vs 2133MHz (Sorry , I can't OC higher than that) , the memory bandwidth remain the same on Intel iGPU side . APU will get bonus memory bandwidth but that bonus is useless for Dolphin
Edit : Tested iGPU is Intel HD Haswell (G3258 iGPU)
As long as the @Op only uses emulator , Ram speed shouldn't matter . Here is DDR3 vs DDR4 benchmark

I just went and bought another 8 gigs of 1600 speed RAM for my Intel NUC 5i7RYH and noticed a slight increase in frame per second stability, however not Picture Perfect yet. If I run my system monitor while playing the game that shows me that the RAM isn't really even being used that much:

Dolphin during heavy gameplay on RE4 uses about 770 MiB RAM (2x Native display rez) getting 25-30 FPS
Dolphin during heavy gameplay on MarioKart uses about 970 MiB - 1300 MiB RAM (2x Native display rez) Getting around 40-45 FPS

That being said something has improved since installing the extra ram. Before the RAM upgrade I could not dream playing MarioKart anything past Native Resolution, so im hopeful. In a couple of weeks I will go and buy 16 GB of 1866 speed RAM to replace the existing 1600 RAM... I'll just have to wait to see what happens. There seems to be plenty of documentation online that states increasing RAM speed will improve gaming on the Intel NUC 5i7RYH which uses iGPU, but who knows.