Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I’m trying to work out the best GPU price/performance ratio for my 5-year-old i7 laptop I have lying around.

My Thinkpad T530 (i7-3520M, 8GB RAM, Ubuntu 17.10) can run Mario Kart Wii almost tolerably at 720p and good at 1.5x. Mario Galaxy 1 is ok at 720p (at around 50fps) and New Super Mario Bros Wii runs faultlessly at 720p. Galaxy 2 stutters badly at 720p but is ok at 1.5x native. Twilight Princess was only manageable at native resolution. And, just to push things as far as they can go, I'd be up for running The Last Story too (though haven't tried that game out yet).

I’d like to get things running at 1080p/60fps. If it’s technically feasible, and if the costs aren’t crazy (this is a budget setup, obviously, if the costs are too high then I'd just start a completely new PC build).

Here’s what I’d be using to connect the GPU: https://www.ebay.de/itm/V8-0-EXP-GDC-Lap...1438.l2649

I’m seeing the 750Ti recommended as a baseline for 1080p. But as I understand it, connecting an eGPU via ExpressCard results in around 30% loss of performance compared to what the GPU would do in a desktop, so would I need a correspondingly more powerful GPU? If so, any recommendations?

GTX 650s seem much cheaper than GTX 750 TI on eBay - but would the ExpressCard/CPU bottlenecks mean those cared couldn't reach 1080p on my setup?
And would sth like a GTX 1050 Ti be total overkill on this kind of system?

And kinda off-topic: could this setup perform reasonably for Cemu? (Or could it be expected to once Cemu’s been further improved?)

Normally I'd recommend you try the 5.0-dev builds first as it fixes bugs and makes the CPU thread faster, but the option for half resolutions (1.5x and 2.5x) has been removed because of the problems they cause, and the GPU thread workload has increased which may cause you to be stuck at 1x resolution.

As for the external express card adapter, those are pretty bad, plus your computer is kinda weak in the CPU department as well. Since you'd be confined to using that in a "desktop" mode anyways, it makes more sense to save up a little more money and build a Ryzen 2nd gen desktop computer just for Dolphin when they get released in the near future.

But if you're really set on using this express card setup, you probably don't want to go below a 750 Ti, because you're losing performance already with the express card so you want to have a good headroom to start with. Plus its a very power efficient card, so even though you'll need to buy some sort of power supply system, it won't have as big of an impact as a 650. And if you get a 1050 Ti, you might as well just go ahead and build a new desktop.

Thanks - I'm mainly set on the express card build because it's possible to set something halfway decent up for not much more than €100, and I'd probably end up spending orders of magnitude more than that on a new desktop build, so it seems fun to knock something together in a DIY way and deal with whatever constraints come with it.

(02-04-2018, 06:17 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]As for the external express card adapter, those are pretty bad, plus your computer is kinda weak in the CPU department as well. Since you'd be confined to using that in a "desktop" mode anyways, it makes more sense to save up a little more money and build a Ryzen 2nd gen desktop computer just for Dolphin when they get released in the near future.

It's interesting that you mention Ryzen though - is a lot expected of the upcoming models? As I understood it, Intel cpus are still preferable for emulation & overclocking etc.

(02-04-2018, 08:16 AM)amicose Wrote: [ -> ]As I understood it, Intel cpus are still preferable for emulation & overclocking etc.

In terms of raw performance yes, Intel CPUs are still preferable at this time.  The problem is that using Intel integrated graphics with Dolphin isn't going to be great, and any emulation of more powerful consoles isn't going to be playable at all (heck, they might not even run).

So your option is either to spend more money getting an Intel CPU + discrete GPU, or sacrificing a bit of performance and getting something like a Ryzen 2200G or 2400G.

However, emulators for consoles that are more powerful than the Wii tend to also be able to take advantage of quad core CPUs, so in that case a Ryzen 2200G will certainly be faster than comparably-priced 2core/4thread Intel products.

Once the CPU gets to the level of performance meaning it can run the game you want at 100% speed without throttling, there's no real advantage to it being any faster. Certainly at desktop-level TDPs, the ryzen CPUs have already reached this point for the vast majority of titles (and those titles that it can't are likely using difficult to emulate features so that an intel CPU would likley struggle too, even if it has a ~20% advantage over the ryzen).

For GPUs, however, once you can get to the level of performance so it can run the game at the defaults with 100% speed, you can use the extra headroom to increase the IR, tweak various 'enhancement' settings, enable MSAA etc.

So there's an inflection point where the GPU starts being more beneficial to focus on than the CPU, hence the interest in the more powerful GPUs from AMD as integrated graphics units.