I have a 13" 2012 MacbookPro with Windows10 installed.
Half of the games I play run at fullspeed with no framedrops, but some of my favorite ones suffer slowdowns.
One of those games is Metroid Prime 3, which can get down to 80% speed even though I have set the virtual CPU to underclock to the minimum clock rate the game does not suffer in-game slowdowns
I'm now planning on buying an eGPU (and connect a GTX 1060 through Thunderbolt 1, which is 10 gbps), but first I want to know if the CPU per-se (i5-3210M; 2 cores @ 2.50 GHz) is enough to run this game as I already know the main bottleneck of my laptop is its lack of a discrete GPU
Anyone knows if my CPU is good enough AND/OR how well that eGPU setup performs on Dolphin?
What are your graphics settings?
Metroid prime will always stutter due to shader compilation.
(06-02-2017, 11:44 AM)Nightstorm229 Wrote: [ -> ]Well, judging by the specs of that i5 3210M, i'm pretty sure that it is good enough, though you may want to turn on its Turbo clock feature, boosts it up to 3.10Ghz, which should up that framerate at least a little bit. On the eGPU side, if you use the built-in display on the Macbook, you should see a performance drop on the 1060 (6GB is what i looked at) of about 50%. Now, if you use that same Macbook and the same GTX 1060 6GB with an external display, you should only get about a 15-30% performance drop on the 1060's performance. Keep in mind though, that these statistics were with Unigine Heaven As for how this all translates to how dolphin runs, id say utilize the Turbo feature of the i5 fr a pretty decent OC on that CPU and try to OC the 1060 a bit to squeeze out as much performance as possible, and your framerates should increase a pretty good amount by adding a discrete GPU.
Good luck dude! Let me know how it goes for you, im a Metroid nut too xD played every game and beat it except for the prime series, and federation force!
I'll buy everything in a couple of months. I'm still saving to buy it (and a SSD upgrade). According to various people on Reddit, the sweet spot is the GTX 1060, so that's the one I want. If I buy a less powerful GPU later I'll need to upgrade it. I want to upgrade my Mac to max
Afaik, the Turbo Boost is enabled automatically (if temperature allows it to), but the "integrated graphics" make the CPU work as if no turbo boost were enabled. With the eGPU the CPU could use the full 3.10 GHz, thus performing better. And don't worry, I'm planning on using it with an external display, because console games are meant to be played on a TV
Ps. I'm a huge Metroid fan!! The only game I haven't completed is Metroid 2 (Now playing AM2R) and FedForce
I seriously hope the rumors of a new Prime installment are true!!
(06-02-2017, 12:44 PM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]Metroid prime will always stutter due to shader compilation.
Don't worry. I already know the difference between slowdowns and stuttering. With my actual machine I get slowdowns AND stuttering. The slowdowns are mainly because of the lack of a discrete GPU, making the CPU do everything. I want to buy an eGPU in order to leave all the rendering to it and have my CPU perform better
You're mixing up a bit here. Every computer has a GPU. The CPU isn't doing anymore processing than it would with a discrete GPU. It just turns out that Intel's on die GPUs aren't that fast.
As for it being faster, meh. It depends. Try running the game at 1x internal resolution. If it's still slow, I question if a dedicated GPU would help you at all.
For Dolphin, GPUs are *mostly* for turning up the internal resolution (The other case being games that need fast EFB access but not relevant here)
(06-02-2017, 02:47 PM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]You're mixing up a bit here. Every computer has a GPU. The CPU isn't doing anymore processing than it would with a discrete GPU. It just turns out that Intel's on die GPUs aren't that fast.
As for it being faster, meh. It depends. Try running the game at 1x internal resolution. If it's still slow, I question if a dedicated GPU would help you at all.
For Dolphin, GPUs are *mostly* for turning up the internal resolution (The other case being games that need fast EFB access but not relevant here)
So the Intel HD Graphics 4000 doesn't rely on the CPU? I've found little and mixed info on internet. I even read that it can enable TurboBoost, which I though was exclusive to the CPU, so that led me to make that assumption. Also, Dolphin has now GPU Texture Decoding, but that feature doesn't even show up with my HD4000. I was wrong, sorry
As for the speed, the game runs mostly at 95%, except on areas with a lot of polygons on-screen (like going to one extreme of Elysia and turning to view a big part of it on-screen) and it can get to 100% if there are few polygons on-screen (like interiors or staring at the skybox). Also, Prime games need access to EFB for occasional post-processing effects and visors, but I think Prime 3 even uses it for post-processing full-time, which I think (not quite sure) it is one of the reasons it runs slower than Prime 1 and 2 on my computer. Also, Prime games need EFB to RAM for the scan visor to work
Also, I could use GPU Texture Decoding to help my CPU a little, but I I think it doesn't help on overall performance most of the time