Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(07-01-2019, 06:53 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]That's what I said, you need an extra hardware solution. A $2-3 heat sink or a $5 fan. It's still an issue that hasn't been brought up. Everyone keeps talking about the GPU. The A72 runs hotter than the previous A53, so even with cooling, your ability to overclock (and do it effectively) is cut back. Given Dolphin's pretty CPU heavy, and just about every SoC running Dolphin eventually runs into thermal throttling issues, I don't see why it should be dismissed so easily.

From what I've seen, a lot of heat sinks don't ultimately prevent the Pi3 from reaching 80C, but they do slow down the time it takes to reach that temp. You need fans or fans + heat sink to get temps below 80C under full load.

I mean yea a ~$5 heatsink and possibly a small fan is needed to prevent thermal throttling. Even the Pi3B specs recommended one to run the system. My current Pi 3b has a heatsink on it the size of the board and a small fan set to kick on when it hits 60c. There will be plenty of cheap and readily available solutions in time for the Pi4 as well. You also need to purchase a 5v 3a power supply (which is a more than a lot of phones ship with) so it won't undervolt and to buy a micro SD card to even boot it.

(07-01-2019, 06:53 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]That's what I said, you need an extra hardware solution. A $2-3 heat sink or a $5 fan. It's still an issue that hasn't been brought up. Everyone keeps talking about the GPU. The A72 runs hotter than the previous A53, so even with cooling, your ability to overclock (and do it effectively) is cut back. Given Dolphin's pretty CPU heavy, and just about every SoC running Dolphin eventually runs into thermal throttling issues, I don't see why it should be dismissed so easily.

From what I've seen, a lot of heat sinks don't ultimately prevent the Pi3 from reaching 80C, but they do slow down the time it takes to reach that temp. You need fans or fans + heat sink to get temps below 80C under full load.

It's not really being dismissed, it's just that active cooling is something 99.9% of all computers need to run something like dolphin at playable speeds, it's an expected cost that has been there for raspberry pi 3 as well, so the community should expect it. 

My point in bringing up thermal throttling wasn't to say that it couldn't be addressed in any form, rather that it was going to be a problem at some point if you're trying to run Dolphin. As I said, a fan or heat sink + fan is enough to keep the Pi3 under 80C at full load, but that's keeping stock clocks in mind.

The thermal situation of the Pi4 means that even with proper cooling, you're still limited in terms of overclocking. Is there more head room with a fan or heat sink? Definitely, but how far you can push that remains to be seen. And as I see it, overclocking is probably going to be required for even middling performance in Dolphin where the GPU's OpenGL ES support doesn't need to be great (e.g. some of the titles Helios mentioned).

So again, to act as if thermal limitations aren't going to even be a factor seems a bit disingenuous, especially if we're considering how to maximize Dolphin on the available hardware.

(07-01-2019, 09:59 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]My point in bringing up thermal throttling wasn't to say that it couldn't be addressed in any form, rather that it was going to be a problem at some point if you're trying to run Dolphin. As I said, a fan or heat sink + fan is enough to keep the Pi3 under 80C at full load, but that's keeping stock clocks in mind.

The thermal situation of the Pi4 means that even with proper cooling, you're still limited in terms of overclocking. Is there more head room with a fan or heat sink? Definitely, but how far you can push that remains to be seen. And as I see it, overclocking is probably going to be required for even middling performance in Dolphin where the GPU's OpenGL ES support doesn't need to be great (e.g. some of the titles Helios mentioned).

So again, to act as if thermal limitations aren't going to even be a factor seems a bit disingenuous, especially if we're considering how to maximize Dolphin on the available hardware.

Once I get mine we can definitely work it out  I have a second tiny fan sitting around I can use and I'm not averse to buying a large heatsink if the flirc case doesn't work out. Could end up being something along the lines of "well it'll run Super Mario Bros Wii buuut... you need an overclock and active cooling". I'm looking to get some of those easier to run games once I get some extra money and can get another wii to rip them with.

I guess the last thing I want to add to this discussion is that you can OC the Pi4 to about 1.7GHz and get stable temps/performance with the right cooling. Tom's Hardware wrote about it earlier as well. Even so, you'd probably need a lot more than that to run Dolphin at even subpar speeds. Consider that Odroid N2 runs an A73 at 1.8GHz and has a GPU + drivers capable of supporting OpenGL ES 3.2, and it still crawls on light titles like Mario Kart. ETA Prime has a video on it. So, I can't imagine the Pi4 doing a whole lot better, but that should offer some perspective on things.

We have some early performance numbers from retroarch on non-dolphin emulators including 3D ones compared to a pi3
https://twitter.com/libretro/status/1145467655421399040

https://www.docdroid.net/OgeIvtm/rpi203420comparison20sheet.pdf

A full rundown on a number of games, different emulators, and unlocked FPS are at the link but here's the overall average increase. I'm not sure if these performance numbers allude to good or bad things for dolphin.
NES 209.5%
SNES 148.2%
GBA 155.8%
N64 68.6%
PS1 109.4%
GBC 86.4%

It means more full speed emulation on N64/PS1 and the ability to use more accurate cores on the other systems, allowing for higher compatibility with classic games. These are very nice things for the raspberry pi emulation community, but also mean very little for Dolphin.

(07-02-2019, 12:27 PM)TKSilver Wrote: [ -> ]It means more full speed emulation on N64/PS1 and the ability to use more accurate cores on the other systems, allowing for higher compatibility with classic games.  These are very nice things for the raspberry pi emulation community, but also mean very little for Dolphin.

I just guessed someone more knowledgeable than I could glean a rough idea of performance from a known quantity having raw performance numbers. Guess not but no problem.

(06-30-2019, 08:35 PM)Intruso Wrote: [ -> ]Also in the same website VideoCore VI appears as Vulkan 1.1 capable:
https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products

That is not the Raspberry Pi 4, that's a completely different SoC. Specifically, the Pi 4 is the Broadcom BCM2711, whereas what is on khronos in that link is the Broadcom BCM7278. The Broadcom BCM7278 is probably for one of their set top box products.

As always, just because the hardware can do it, doesn't mean the video drivers can do it. In this case, the set top boxes are under a totally different (and very closed) environment than the Raspberry Pi and use their own proprietary driver stack, while the Raspberry Pi is open and uses the open source driver stack. These video drivers are very different, so don't expect that capability to carry over to the Pi 4! Especially since they lost the only employee they had working on the Mesa driver stack.

The video driver situation may improve, but it may not. What it does currently is all we can be sure of!

(06-30-2019, 08:35 PM)Intruso Wrote: [ -> ]I found at khronos.org that VideoCore V (the previous version of RP4's GPU) is OpenGLES3.1 conformant
https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products/opengles
...so we can assume VideoCore VI is at least hardware capable with ES3.1.

Don't make that assumption! Support can go down with new hardware. Since their only employee working no Mesa has left, it isn't that surprising that their driver support has worsened.

Going back to the discussion of thermals. A new pi 4 firmware update is currently in the testing phase which has reduced the power draw and heat of the entire board by tweaking the setup and dropping the power draw of the VL805 controller considerably
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-firmware-update-tested,39791.html

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After:


It doesn't prevent throttling w/o a heatsink completely but reduces the overall heat of the board and the power draw and by extension makes it take significantly longer to begin throttling. I wonder if this will allow a more potent overclock to become viable?