Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

All,

Unfortunately my i5-2500T / Nvidia GTX 660 2GB DDR5 HTPC system died. I'm now searching for a replacement.

The system was connected to my TV screen (1920x1080) and mainly used for watching netflix, play music and some occasional gaming. WII super mariokart is my favorite game :-)

I have always been running Linux, first Gentoo, later Fedora. The performance was just ok, far from a steady 60fps, but usually (depending on the build version and settings) playable with two players. I ran it at 2x native resolution and some minor graphic enhancements. I have the impression that the CPU was the bottleneck, the GPU could do this easily. I would like to improve the performance because it was always a bit of a struggle to get it at a playable rate.

Now looking at the replacement, I would really like to have a small device like/similar to the Intel NUC. E.g. an Asus VivoMini, Acer Revo Cube or Fujitsu Esprimo.

Compared to the i5-2500T (launched in Q1 2011) and DDR3 memory, I expect a big difference here, no matter which recent i5 cpu I choose. Now I have some questions for which I can't find recent data / experiences from others:

1. Can I safely choose a mobile or low power version of the i5 or only look after desktop versions?
   
2. Are integrated graphics powerful enough? Will I notice a difference between a 620/630/iris integrated graphics?
   
3. When using integrated graphics, will dolphin gain much performance improvements (from unplayable to playable) when using Windows compared to Linux? (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a...ffee&num=3 seems to indicate that there is no huge difference)
   

Thanks in advance for any input!

1.
Newer Intel ULV CPUs are certainly a lot better than they were in 2011. They still have a very low thermal ceiling and will throttle, pretty much by design. They were designed for burst, not sustained performance.

Whether it's sustained performance is good enough, we don't really know. Depends on the CPU, and the game.

That said, pretty much any current or last gen desktop CPU will run Dolphin fine (Maybe excluding some weird models that were designed for OEMs to put in shitty desktops??).

2.

Yeah. Newer intel iGPUs (Like the 630) are typically fine for 720p Dolphin (1080p in some games). Iris pro is significantly more powerful than the numbered versions but it also only exists in high end devices.

3.

I've found that D3D11 is a bit faster than our GL backend in Dolphin on Intel. Whether thats worth running Windows is up to you. Intel's GL drivers on Linux are fine.

Thanks for the quick reply!


This sounds all promising, except that it is hard to find a really small ready-to-use device that does not have an ULV cpu :-)

After some searching I came to the following possibility:

• asrock deskmini 310 (with optional wifi and vesa mount; power supply is included)
  
• intel core i3-8300 having uhd graphics 630, running at 3.7GHz
  
• reuse sata ssd from the old system
  
• ddr-2400 2x4GB (to be selected)
  
• maybe a more silent cooler than the default intel one
  

Likely below EUR. 500,- for this build, which I had in mind!

I can't find a solution with an iris GPU. Another option for the CPU is the i5-8600. It runs between 3.1 and 4.3GHz, has 1MB of additional L3 cache, 2 additional cores, and supports the faster DDR4-2666. Downside: priced for an additional EUR. 90 (increase of 67%). So I guess that the i3 is not only cheaper, but also performing better for dolphin-emu?

you don't need extra cores for Dolphin. We only really need two fast threads. Everything after that is just nice to have for offloading background OS tasks to, but largely don't make much of a difference in performance.

As for the GPU, maybe somebody who's used that GPU in Dolphin can speak to it's performance? By the numbers it should be fine for at minimum 720p. I used a haswell GPU in Dolphin at 720p for awhile.

I've got an HD Graphics 620 in my laptop and it seems to do just fine with 720p. I can't imagine the 630 having any trouble.

Thanks again!

I also found these two:

• https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-intel-hd-630
  

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVRnwRHf...e=youtu.be
  

Which confirm that 720p should not be a problem on the Pentium G4600, while the i3-8300 is slightly faster when looking at the raw specs.

I guess I will give it a try and post the results here!

Well.. finally an update!

Plans changed slightly, I have just ordered the following:
- Case: Antec ISK300-150 (150w power supply included)
- Mobo: Asrock B450 Fatal1ty Gaming-ITX/ac (1 case fan included)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
- CPU cooler: Noctua NH-L9a-AM4
- Memory: Kingston HyperX predator 2x4GB


I'll post an update again later this week!

The 2400G is a great little chip. You should be able to run most things in Dolphin except maybe the few games that got hit pretty hard by Dynamic BATs (Mostly Rogue Squadron) just fine. The GPU in that thing should push Dolphin at 1080p with no issues.

One thing to watch out for with the Ryzen chips with integrated graphics is they're very sensitive to memory bandwidth and thus clockspeed — Ryzen is already to some extent, but the killer is the integrated graphics. It's good you have two sticks at what I assume is DDR4-2400, so it can be dual-channel.

Finally, an update!

Last weekend I finally played around with Dolphin again on this system. It runs smoothly at 1080p! Tested it only with the WII games Super Mario Kart and F1 2009.