Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello everyone! This is my first time posting here. Not sure if this belongs under this section or the support section, but meh if it needs to be moved no big deal.
I recently built a new PC and its not performing as well as I expected.
 Here are the specs:
 

• RX 480 4GB
  
• Xeon E3 1275l (Quad Core, nearly identical performance to i7-4790)
  
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
  
• 2TB hard drive
  

I understand that the biggest factor for performance in dolphin is the CPU, but from my research it seems like I should be getting better performance than I currently do. For instance in super Mario Galaxy 2, I usually get framerates of <45, even dropping below 30 fairly regularly. This video: shows someone achieving a buttery 60FPS in Galaxy 2 with an RX480 and an amd fx-8320 processor. In theory, I should be getting the same level of performance since i have the same GPU and my processor actually has higher per core performance. I'm getting equally as bad performance in most dolphin games as well (Zelda Twilight princess(wii) I get ~20FPS).

What's even weirder is looking in the performance tab of task manager, none of the cores seem to be maxing to 100% usage. Neither does the GPU. It doesn't seem to be thermal throttling either, I checked the temps in HWMonitor and they were ~30C.

I'm really confused by this. What could the problem be? Not enough RAM? VRAM? RAM too slow? Mechanical hard drive to slow(loading data from the ISO)? Dolphin for some reason not being allocated enough CPU time/resources? driver issue? Poorly configured settings? 

Thanks for your time and help!

TLDR: Solution: Don't use "power saver" as your Windows power plan. Don't use OpenGL with RX Cards.

you have identical performance to the 4790 in multi-threaded workloads. Not single threaded. That Xeon CPU is clocked pretty low and Dolphin needs very good single threaded performance.

EDIT: Ah, it has an impressive turbo clock. Your CPU may not be pushing the 2 cores Dolphin puts load on to the highest clocks. It should be able to.

Use the latest development build, change the graphics backend from OpenGL to either Direct3D 11 or Vulkan. AMD sucks at GL. Beyond that, there is nothing you can do

(06-08-2018, 05:18 PM)parker-parker Wrote: [ -> ]Hello everyone! This is my first time posting here. Not sure if this belongs under this section or the support section, but meh if it needs to be moved no big deal.
I recently built a new PC and its not performing as well as I expected.
 Here are the specs:
 

• RX 480 4GB
  
• Xeon E3 1275l (Quad Core, nearly identical performance to i7-4790)
  
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
  
• 2TB hard drive
  

I understand that the biggest factor for performance in dolphin is the CPU, but from my research it seems like I should be getting better performance than I currently do. For instance in super Mario Galaxy 2, I usually get framerates of <45, even dropping below 30 fairly regularly. This video:

Spoiler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k72FE-qWfxk

shows someone achieving a buttery 60FPS in Galaxy 2 with an RX480 and an amd fx-8320 processor. In theory, I should be getting the same level of performance since i have the same GPU and my processor actually has higher per core performance. I'm getting equally as bad performance in most dolphin games as well (Zelda Twilight princess(wii) I get ~20FPS).

What's even weirder is looking in the performance tab of task manager, none of the cores seem to be maxing to 100% usage. Neither does the GPU. It doesn't seem to be thermal throttling either, I checked the temps in HWMonitor and they were ~30C.

I'm really confused by this. What could the problem be? Not enough RAM? VRAM? RAM too slow? Mechanical hard drive to slow(loading data from the ISO)? Dolphin for some reason not being allocated enough CPU time/resources? driver issue? Poorly configured settings? 

Thanks for your time and help!

Make sure your Windows power plan has been set to High performance, otherwise it will clock down the CPU when it has to wait, which usually causes stutters and bad performance in general.

I wonder if you can use Throttle Stop with Xeon processors

(06-08-2018, 05:38 PM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]you have identical performance to the 4790 in multi-threaded workloads. Not single threaded. That Xeon CPU is clocked pretty low and Dolphin needs very good single threaded performance.

EDIT: Ah, it has an impressive turbo clock. Your CPU may not be pushing the 2 cores Dolphin puts load on to the highest clocks. It should be able to.

Yes thanks for highlighting that. I should have mentioned that it only achieves this single threaded performance due to its turbo. Anyway, looking in CPU-Z I noticed it would hardly reach a clock speed of 1GHz even when Dolphin was emulating. I did some sleuthing in my PC's settings and it turns out the power options weren't letting the CPU speed up at all, just like I later realized mstreurman said.

(06-08-2018, 08:09 PM)mstreurman Wrote: [ -> ]Make sure your Windows power plan has been set to High performance, otherwise it will clock down the CPU when it has to wait, which usually causes stutters and bad performance in general.

^This was the problem^

(06-08-2018, 05:38 PM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]Use the latest development build, change the graphics backend from OpenGL to either Direct3D 11 or Vulkan. AMD sucks at GL. Beyond that, there is nothing you can do

Yeah, I noticed that too. Switched to D11.

Thanks guys. Works flawlessly now!
TLDR: Don't use "power saver" as your Windows power plan. Don't use OpenGL with RX Cards.