Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Currently I run dolphin on  my lowend notebook HP Pavilion 15 n002LA which has dual graphics and btw I am only interested in playing Mario kart and zelda games, the specs are as follows:


APU  ------>  AMD Elite Quad-Core A10-5745M up to 2.9 GHz, it has 4 threads max

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon HD 8610G + 8670M with DDR3 of 2048 MB, upto 6499 MB of total graphics memory

Ram  ------>  SDRAM DDR3L 8 Gb


right now I am in the process of exchanging this notebook for a budget custom build desktop ( not sure if I must to just for the sake to run dolphin and other emulators with higher FPS ) the custom Desktop specs are as follows:

in this order ( better performance over price is prefferable, still I'm on a tight budget  ):

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(1)

CPU  ------>  Intel core i3 7350k

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(2)

CPU  ------>  Intel core i3 7320

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(3)

CPU  ------>  Intel core i3 7300

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(4)

CPU  ------>  Intel core i3 7100

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(5)

CPU  ------>  Intel pentium G4620

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(6)

CPU  ------>  Intel pentium G4600

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(7)

CPU  ------>  Intel pentium G4560

GPU  ------>  AMD Radeon RX 550 2Gb / Nvidia GTX 1050

Ram  ------>  2 x 4 Gb ddr4 2400 MHz

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Your laptop isn't great, but less demanding games could run decently - particularly if you use the newest development build of Dolphin as well as the Vulkan renderer.


Also, regarding desktop PCs, you really should consider an i3-8100 or i3-8350k instead of the i3-7320 and/or i3-7350k, especially since the latter requires a Z-series motherboard to overclock anyway (which are the only types of boards currently available for the Intel 8000-series).

And depending on how much latency improvement there will be to the cache and memory sub-system, even the upcoming Ryzen 2200G and Ryzen 2400G may be good options, especially if you don't want to spend extra money on a low-end discrete GPU (if they behave like previous Ryzen chips, then fast memory will farther improve cache latency).

(01-22-2018, 09:44 AM)Nintendo Maniac 64 Wrote: [ -> ]Your laptop isn't great, but less demanding games could run decently - particularly if you use the newest development build of Dolphin as well as the Vulkan renderer.

how to know if my laptop supports vulkan?

(01-22-2018, 09:53 AM)sauerplayer Wrote: [ -> ]how to know if my laptop supports vulkan?

By running the newest development build of Dolphin, setting the graphics backend to "Vulkan", and seeing if it runs? (it likely will only work on your discrete 8670M and not your integrated 8610G).

Seriously though, your discrete GPU uses the GCN architecture and therefore supports Vulkan. However, you may need updated GPU drivers in order for it to work.

thanks for the info on the CPU i3 8100 and i3 8350k the really are better than those I posted and almost at the same price but the question remains. Are the Ryzen 2200G and Ryzen 2400G more expensive than i3 8350k?

It's important to note that using integrated graphics will require you to spend around 20 bucks more on fast dual-channel RAM if you want comparable GPU performance.

And I'd like to emphasize that, while we know there will be latency improvements to the memory subsystem, we can only speculate at this time whether this will actually result in noticeable performance gains for Ryzen processors in Dolphin (for whatever reason, Dolphin seems to be one of the worst-case scenarios for the 1000-series Ryzen CPUs in terms of performance-per-GHz).

(01-22-2018, 10:11 AM)sauerplayer Wrote: [ -> ]Are the Ryzen 2200G and Ryzen 2400G more expensive than i3 8350k?

Keep in mind that Ryzen processors can be overclocked on even the less expensive B-series motherboards (though many of the currently-available AM4 motherboards likely won't have out-of-the-box support for the 2200G and/or 2400G and would require a BIOS update, and updating the BIOS would require an older AM4 CPU that the board does support out-of-the-box).

Nevertheless, here's the official press slide on the matter:

Yeah, "on paper" a 2400G should be faster for dolphin than anything but the top-end ryzen and rx 550 (3.9 boost for the cpu, more CUs than the 550). But as mentioned above you may hit into bandwidth issues more easily.

While the 2xxx series should be quite a bit less picky about ram and timings, ddr4 prices are sky-high at the moment, so that could make a significant difference to the overall cost...

All of the builds you listed will run Dolphin fine.

Although with Dolphin as a goal it's hard not to recommend Ryzen for budget builds because until Intel releases non Z chipsets, that's already a $20-50 USD savings in exchange for some CPU perf you really don't need for your use cases.