Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Yeah, it's both. We've improved the overall CPU performance a lot, while we decreased the GPU performance for higher accuracy. While common game systems still have enough GPU power to run the higher load at 4k, we think it's fine.

The next part is unrelated.

We also fixed a "bug" which just wasted lots of CPU power in the GPU thread while waiting for the CPU thread. This fix doesn't improve the performance (neither decrease it), but it reduces the power consumtion. Bad luck, in the task manager, dolphin now usually shows only half of the CPU utiliaztion.

So, now to your issue.

Dolphin runs a bit slower now because of your weak GPU performance. You think it's a bug not using all of the available CPU power (as the taskmanager shows it). But in fact, it's just a combination of both illustrated effects.

Theoretical problem.

We're most of the time emulating the CPU, sometimes the GPU. Both may run in parallel, but they very often don't. One emulation task can't (read: impossible) be split up to many threads. So please tweak your task manager to show your the CPU time of the dolphin process normalized to *one* core, not to all cores. This will be a bit more than 100%, so there are no more ressources to use.

Bought a maxed out imac 27 inch with amd r9 m395, and performance is exactly the same as my mini with an intel hd 5000... Yeah I guess I was totally wrong all along!

Please return the iMac and build a PC 2 times faster. Thank you

(11-12-2016, 03:22 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: [ -> ]Please return the iMac and build a PC 2 times faster. Thank you

See how much of assholes you guys are?  You know the imac is fast enough to run dolphin. I have a 4.0ghz quad core cpu.

Not an asshole, I just hate seeing money go to waste.

You wouldn't have any of those problems with a PC for 1k $. It would actually perform faster.

(11-12-2016, 03:29 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: [ -> ]Not an asshole, I just hate seeing money go to waste.

You wouldn't have any of those problems with a PC for 1k $. It would actually perform faster.

What part of performs exactly the same or worse than a computer 5-10x weaker didn't you get?

Eh, Anti-Ultimate is an asshole sometimes. Ignore them for now.

But the reason it's slow in OS X is because OS X has really slow GPUs and GPU drivers. You're being bottlenecked at graphics. That's why your CPU isn't being used.

Well that and Dolphin really only uses two hard working threads, and that's already a bit of a hack for emulation.

Bootcamp windows on that machine and it'll likely run fine.

(11-12-2016, 06:40 AM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]Eh, Anti-Ultimate is an asshole sometimes. Ignore them for now.

But the reason it's slow in OS X is because OS X has really slow GPUs and GPU drivers. You're being bottlenecked at graphics. That's why your CPU isn't being used.

Well that and Dolphin really only uses two hard working threads, and that's already a bit of a hack for emulation.

Bootcamp windows on that machine and it'll likely run fine.

No, there is just something wrong. I have given up. I can play wii games in max resolution/aa on dolphin 3.5. I will continue to use dolphin 3.5. I will not use Windows just because the directx backend has more attention.

Edit: Just tested 3.5 playing Fire Emblem (wii) on 4x native resolution and it maxes 100% emulation speed. That solution works for me.

It's possible that your GPU isn't being used. When you start a game, check the yellow text and see if it says it's running on the AMD GPU or the Intel GPU

(11-13-2016, 01:04 PM)labyrinth153 Wrote: [ -> ]I will not use Windows just because the directx backend has more attention.

Actually it's the Vulkan backend which has the most attention right now. It works everywhere, except, you guessed it, OSX.