It's hard to recommend the GT 1030 when the RX 550 outperforms it at the same price and sub 75W tbqh.
but OP is happy with the old GPU so it's irrelevant anyways.
Rather a lot has happens since I posted last. Firstly the card I bought turned out to be faulty to I had to return it. It was causing the computer to shut down after 15 minutes or so and the computer could not be rebooted for some time. I am assuming this was a card heat issue since removing the card allowed the computer to be rebooted immediately.
So this leaves me in the situation that I started in but much wiser about the capabilities of an improved GPU's effect on Dolphin. It seems to me that on a limited budget a card upgrade like the RX 550 would be a suitable replacement card and should give similar results to the GTX 560. Upgrading the CPU on my PC would also involve upgrading my motherboard and probably RAM as well which would be a more costly affair.
Looking further forward CPU upgrade would be a smart move and that is something I'll probably move towards at a later date. I've also seen a PS3 emulator and so finding something spec appropriate for that may be something to look into. I have yet to try it on my current build but I'm expecting it to very (unplayable) slow.
Finally I see that GPU are usually rated with a 2D and a 3D performance rating. Which of these is most important for Dolphin?
Thanks for the help so far.
(06-24-2019, 07:05 AM)George Spiggott Wrote: [ -> ]Finally I see that GPU are usually rated with a 2D and a 3D performance rating. Which of these is most important for Dolphin?
I'm not aware of any GPU manufacturer talking about "2d" performance numbers since the mid '90s. All graphics goes through the same pipeline on the card, "2d" being the same as "3d" just without a depth/perspective translation. And the vast majority of "2d" games tend to be much less demanding, often ending up with the sprite management and similar being a lot more costly than the actual graphics rendering.
If you want a decent idea of how a card compares, anandtech's "bench" (see the top bar on their site) has a lot of GPUs tested in a number of titles - while none exactly match dolphin, for the most part it'll give you a good idea of the relative performance (It's probably best to look at the example game numbers, as some artificial or compute tests can show large differences that don't relate to dolphin). If you do use their bench, it may be older-generation cards are only in older benchmark runs, but it should give you a ballpark by comparing with example GPUs that are in multiple years' GPU benchmarks.