Planning to turn an older desktop into a little entertainment center
Specs are i7-3930K, gtx-560, lots of ram, potential to store roms on fast ssd drives (raid-0 stripe of two drives)
questions:
- Will the CPU be an unusable bottleneck?
- How about the video card?
- Does storing the roms on the fast storage make a difference?
- Does screen resolution make a difference? (my nice hi-res display broke, now using a lower-res 4:3 monitor)
- In general - is one of gamecube vs. wii emulation better/more performant?
(07-06-2016, 09:01 PM)dmko Wrote: [ -> ]Does storing the roms on the fast storage make a difference?
Not really. Any hard drive should be fast enough.
(07-06-2016, 09:01 PM)dmko Wrote: [ -> ]Does screen resolution make a difference? (my nice hi-res display broke, now using a lower-res 4:3 monitor)
Well, it makes a difference to how high-res graphics you can display, but that's about it.
4:3 is actually a good fit for Dolphin. Some Wii games are locked to 16:9, but there are a lot more GameCube games that are locked to 4:3.
(07-06-2016, 09:01 PM)dmko Wrote: [ -> ]In general - is one of gamecube vs. wii emulation better/more performant?
The performance depends more on the game than the console.
Thanks for the insight!
(note: I forgot to ask about video card too- updated original post to squeeze that in)
Your GTX 560 doesn't have DX12 support yet, so you won't be able to use that.
Since you can't use Direct3D 12 and using the software renderer isn't exactly practical, one thing you may (or may not) want to consider is even disabling SMT and/or some CPU cores so as to achieve a higher overclock since Dolphin doesn't really use that many CPU threads.
Thanks!
followup question - I'm still a bit confused about what specs to look out for...
I.e. for my processor, which metrics here tell us where it falls on the compatibility range for dolphin:
http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Inte...o-3_80-GHz ?
Also, it seems my card does support DX11, and from reading the forums- I thought GPU wasn't really that important?
Note I do have a more modern asus laptop... smaller screen but might end up playing on that
(also osx machine at work but can't play on that hehe, running the benchmark just to give some stats to the community anyway)
GPU got a little more important with the switch to integer math. Drivers and more recent hardware have gotten more efficient with it, but it's still a bit of a perf impact. Intel GPUs will typically limit you to native internal resolution or maybe 2x in many cases.
Something with a slightly decent nvidia GPU will let you comfortably sit at 1080p internal resolutions in OpenGL. More with D3D12 in many cases.
Your hardware should be okay for the most part. Just use OpenGL (Referring to the desktop)