Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi everyone I'm new here!

I've been reading for a few months and agonizing over making the perfect little mini itx box for dolphin to sit under my tv. I took an educated guess and things turned out well. I hope this helps others decide on hardware!

After reading through a lot of posts here and on reddit with a lot of maybe's and should be type statements from people guessing at specific budget hardware for dolphin I made a few purchases and just wanted to post it here. I hope it helps people!

I found a used hp prodesk 400 g4 sff with a Pentium g4560 and 8gb of ram for about 180 Canadian loonies, and took a long time deciding on an Nvidia gt 1030 for about 120 loonies. The low profile single slot card just to say fits. I see a lot of questions about these small cards and these cramped cases.
The exact card(https://www.amazon.ca/GIGABYTE-GeForce-G...30+&sr=8-1)

After a bit of testing I'm happy to say that it works great! I have to use a lower setting for the uber shaders but they are enabled(I can't remember which settings exactly) , and I can play my games on my tv at 3x no problem! The titles I've tried so far have been super mario sunshine and super mario galaxy 2. Are there any other games anyone wants me to test? I'd like to be helpful if I can!

*edited to correct my link to the card in question, I posted the wrong one! My first post and I'm already embarrassing myself...

Any possibility of testing Last Story? That game in my experience is insanely GPU heavy.

(07-14-2019, 02:04 AM)bomblord Wrote: [ -> ]Any possibility of testing Last Story? That game in my experience is insanely GPU heavy.

Sure! I'll give it a try on Monday and post my findings. 

I just want to say is that, for pretty much anything other than heavy single to dual-threaded tasks (like Dolphin), a Ryzen 3200G or 3400G by itself without a discrete GPU and paired with some decently fast dual-channel RAM (which is quite cheap nowadays) tends to be a wiser investment, and even in Dolphin they tend to still perform well enough for 99% of people.


A 3200G will be cheaper with considerably stronger multi-threaded CPU performance which is ideal for native PC games or emulators for stronger consoles (like PCSX3 and the like) while not being that much slower in GPU performance (especially in newer APIs like Vulkan), while a 3400G for a similar if not slightly cheaper price will have much stronger multi-threaded CPU performance as well as even closer-to-GT1030 GPU performance. Both the Ryzens also support AVX unlike the Pentium which may be useful in some more modern emulators. Do keep in mind however that the 3200G and 3400G use the older Zen+ architecture found in 6+ core Ryzen 2000 processors, not the new Zen2 architecture used by the rest of the Ryzen 3000 family.

There's also the niggle that the GT 1030 DDR4 exists which is much slower than the GDDR5 version to the point of being more on-level with Intel integrated graphics or a Ryzen APU with single-channel RAM (rather than dual-channel), so going with a Ryzen APU also avoids that issue altogether. Additionally there's some newer performance investigations pointing to surprisingly poor Vulkan performance on the GT 1030 (even on the GDDR5 model) to the point of the Ryzen APUs having like twice the GPU performance, and Vulkan is quite important for modern more demanding emulators.

Besides, getting a Ryzen APU means you can get a truly console-like form factor with something like the ASRock DeskMini A300 (do note that it was originally designed for the 2200G and 2400G instead, so it might not have the BIOS support for the 3200G and 3400G at this time). And if money is no object and maximizing performance for all tasks is all you care about, then instead go for an Intel Hade's Canyon NUC aka the "NUC8i7HVK" (the product page does a poor job of explaining the CPU but it's basically a soldered Kaby Lake i7 paired with the Vega embedded discrete GPU equivalent of an RX 470).


The single niggle in all of this is that AMD's OpenGL driver stack on Windows isn't designed for performance with all the extensions and stuff that Nvidia uses but rather for plain old vanilla spec-compliance, though it is worth nothing however that the AMD OpenGL driver and performance on Linux is a bajillion times better, not to mention it "just works" out-of-the-box right when you install the OS. In general you'll get better emulation performance in Linux anyway, and as a side benefit I've found it's also way easier to get the official Nintendo GameCube USB adapter to work with Dolphin on Linux than on Windows.

Oh wow you're right! I did end up buying the ddr5 version, but I somehow grabbed the wrong link! I'll fix that asap! 

(07-14-2019, 04:30 AM)Gravel_Pit Wrote: [ -> ]Oh wow you're right! I did end up buying the ddr5 version, but I somehow grabbed the wrong link! I'll fix that asap!

Oh phew, you definitely dodged a bullet there.

BTW, you can massively shorten the URL to either of the following:

• https://amazon.ca/dp/B071DY2VJR
  
• https://amazon.ca/GIGABYTE-GeForce-GV-N1...B071DY2VJR

Also it might be wise to replace the "amazon.ca" portion of the URL with "amazon.com" instead:

• https://amazon.com/dp/B071DY2VJR
  
• https://amazon.com/GIGABYTE-GeForce-GV-N...B071DY2VJR

Nevertheless, my point still stands that a Ryzen APU is typically a wiser route to go, but yes your configuration will indeed actually be faster for very lightly-threaded programs like Dolphin that gain minimal benefit from more than two CPU cores (unless you have a bunch of background programs and services running, but at that point maybe some sort of "baby's first Linux" would be wiser anyway...).

(07-14-2019, 02:04 AM)bomblord Wrote: [ -> ]Any possibility of testing Last Story? That game in my experience is insanely GPU heavy.

So I gave it a go this morning for a half hour or so, and it runs full speed at 3x! I checked my task manager occasionally and it shows CPU and GPU usage about 50% so there is lots of headroom for bigger scenes and fights later on! I did get the occasional hiccup when the characters were speaking while walking around, but I think that's just because it was loading data off of the drive(I'm currently using an external USB 3.0 spinny).

(07-15-2019, 07:53 PM)Gravel_Pit Wrote: [ -> ]... I checked my task manager occasionally and it shows CPU and GPU usage about 50% so there is lots of headroom for bigger scenes and fights later on! ...

Take note that CPU usage of 50% isn't accurate. Dolphin runs on 2 threads, one for the CPU and one for GPU, so on the Pentium G4560 (a 2 core/4 thread processor), you're going to be slamming 2 of those threads really hard with Dolphin's emulation (it jumps around between the actual cores/threads because of thread scheduling). This is why you're seeing 50% CPU utilization (plus other background processes like the OS and other things are being run as well)

https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldn...-go-faster

(07-15-2019, 07:53 PM)Gravel_Pit Wrote: [ -> ]So I gave it a go this morning for a half hour or so, and it runs full speed at 3x! I checked my task manager occasionally and it shows CPU and GPU usage about 50% so there is lots of headroom for bigger scenes and fights later on! I did get the occasional hiccup when the characters were speaking while walking around, but I think that's just because it was loading data off of the drive(I'm currently using an external USB 3.0 spinny).

Ahh nice Dolphin has got some serious performance upgrades since I last ran that game it seems.

I know this is an old thread, but I am very curious on how your setup is holding up today.

I have both a hp prodesk 400 g4 sff and a nvidia gt1030 2gb ddr5 on the way, so I hope maybe you could bring me some insight on if the setup still works and if you experienced any problem with the power (curious since the prodesk 400 g4 only has a 180PSU)