For playing typical older GameCube games, would my desktop be faster than my laptop based on these specifications. I know Dolphin is more CPU-dependent than GPU.
Desktop:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.0 GHz
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GT 512 MB
4 GB DDR2 RAM
Laptop:
Intel Core i7 720QM Quad @ 1.7GHz
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 1 GB
8 GB DDR3 RAM
Any suggestions aside from upgrading to the modern era? And how much worse would the 7950 GT be compared to the HD 5870, unless the 5870 is bottlenecked by the CPU already....
Shoot, just realized I'd have to use an older build of Dolphin since the latest version doesn't use DirectX 9... would OpenGL work by chance? (Doubtful.) EDIT: Answered my own question. At any rate, with an older build, would the desktop be better or no?
Since Dolphin is a dual core applicaion , Core 2 duo @ 3.0GHz should be way faster than that i7
but 7950 GT is a directx9 card . Dolphin no longer supports dx9 , so you're out of luck , i guess
Some suggestions :
_Upgrade your graphic card (desktop) to GTX 1050 which is only $110 , you can use a more modern graphic backend like Vulkan (any OS except OSX) and Directx12 (Windows 10 only) . This should speed up game a little bit and you can run game at 1080p
_Upgrade your CPU (laptop) to either i7 640M ($50 on ebay) or i7 920XM ($110) . Both of them have fairly high turbo speed (around 3.0 - 3.3GHz) , i7 640M is slightly faster than i7 920XM but i7 640M is a HT dual core CPU so it may not be good for video encoding tasks
Thank you for the response, I hadn't thought about upgrading the CPU in my laptop, but that's definitely an idea for the future. Though I'm not sure I'll be upgrading any time soon unfortunately, but perhaps when I have the funds, I'll just try to build a new desktop altogether, I'd originally built this one for older games that can't run on Windows 7 or above, thus I can dual-boot multiple Windows OSes, I had the laptop before I built the desktop. It'd still be neat to modify my G73JH and see how much more I could get out of it. Who says a 7 year old laptop can't keep up with today?
I may have to try an older build of Dolphin to see if it works better with DirectX 9, at least on older GC games, but ultimately, I'll probably have to build a new system sadly. (I will do everything in my power to run Windows 7 however, I'm not a fan of MS pushing Windows 10. They're even saying 7 can't keep up with today's security demands, despite Windows 10 having spyware/easily hackable malware built deeply in.)
Using a very old version will require the double CPU performance. I'd take the laptop and hope it won't overheat :/ Light games might be fine.
I've used my laptop for quite a few games in Dolphin, granted most of them were lighter games such as Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, among others. I tried some heavier games and had to underclock using the override CPU clock setting, which of course caused glitches in certain areas and the characters moved slower than they should. With my laptop, it's not the CPU temperature that should be worried about, it's the GPU, though Dolphin hardly puts any load on my GPU and I repaste regularly.
Do you play at native resolutions? Dolphin has quite a high load on it's pixel shaders. But as native resolution is very low, most GPUs should handle it well.
Yes I do, I only play the games with 640 x 480 resolution and the recommended settings from the Wiki for the particular game, other than that I don't mess with the settings much.