I've been using Dolphin via Steam in-home streaming on my HTPC because I'm sure it wouldn't be able to run natively on an old GTX 460 1GB that's installed on it. I've been meaning to upgrade it to an RX 580 4GB so I can expand the games I can play locally. I was hoping that would mean I could also run dolphin, but I'm wondering if that would be enough because the CPU is an AMD FX-8300. I checked the FAQ page and there is a specific note stating that the only AMD cpus recommended for Dolphin are Ryzen chips.
I don't know if this makes any difference, but I'm only interested in GameCube emulation. Not Wii. Would an FX-8300 (stock) / RX 580 be enough to pull it off?
Full Specs
AMD FX-8300
RX 580 4GB **Don't have it yet***
16GB DDR3 1866mhz
1TB SanDisk SSD
Wii isn´t more demanding than GC. There are very taxing games for both platforms.
What games specifically are you interested in, anyway?
An AMD FX cpu is one of the worst cpus that you can use. Other bad ones would be an intel atom(or atom based) cpu or a mobile phone. Just try it with your current GPU at 1xIR and no enhancements. If the games that you want to play stutter then, your cpu is too slow, and a faster GPU won't even give you 1 fps more.
Your GTX 460 is even likely to be fast enough for 3xIR. At least that's what i'm guessing from my experience with my old Radeon HD 7790, and the fact that both cards are supposedly about equally fast.
Also, the performance greatly depends on each game. You can't even make basic assumptions like, "the graphics in this game look more complex" or wii vs gamecube game in order to determine how well a game is going to run.
The GTX 460 is not that bad in emulation. It is faster then the GT 640 (version 2 1GB GDDR5 kepler based) that I used to run in my emulation PC. That system could run native easily and 2x for a lot of games. It is slower then the GTX 750ti I currently use in my emulation PC which handles 3x just fine for most titles, but not by that much. Though the older Fermi architecture does not support Vulkan (if I remember correctly) so you are limited to the directX or OpenGL backends.
That being said the CPU is going to be the limiting factor and you are correct that any non zen based AMD CPUs are not recommended and will severely limit which games will run at decent performance. There are worse CPUs you could use and the FX-8300 is no where near as bad as an intel atom or mobile phone, but just expect that any CPU demanding games will not run at full speed.
From what I gather it seems Dolphin is CPU bound and my current GPU isn't the primary concern. I scored a second hand RX 580 4GB for under $100 so I've got it installed, but I'll stick with steam in-home streaming on my HTPC. I don't feel like going through the trouble of transferring my entire library from my Main PC (CPU: AMD R7 1700x) and configuring Dolphin on my FX 8300 system if the CPU is known to be inadequate. I figured that I might get away with Gamecube emulation because its the weaker console sort of like how Nes, Snes, and N64 emulation is less demanding. I was wrong.
Btw, The games I play are:
Mario Sunshine
Paper Mario: Thousand year door
Bloody Roar: Primal Fury
Smash Bros. Melee
Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess
Star Fox Adventures
SoulCalbur II
The steaming actually works fairly well after setting up the games to launch via Steam. Latency feels non-existent! The RX 580 is just to let me play more of my steam games natively.