Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi There,

I have quite an old mac, it is 8 years old, I can run GBA games and SNES without any issue at all. I am trying to play F-Zero GX which seems like a demanding game in terms of power. I've read that on here that even some of the most high end PC's can't run some wii games at full capacity, so I am not really surprised that my computer is having issues, but I am not so sure if it is my configuration in Dolphin that might be causing issues or if my pc just isn't up for the job. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Thank you.

Looking at you profile it says you have a i5 but no model number. This is relevant since determine generation of the cpu and max turbo speeds. What are you settings. Setting like internal resolution can increase the GPU load most other setting are better of at default with the exception of backend which is trail and error. I not use to mac but most of the should apply. As for the Wii being more harder to emulate it not as bad as you think. It mostly depend on the game in question. Super smash brawl run better in general then rogue squadard 2 despite it being a wii game over a gamecube game. There are hard to run wii games though. Also are getting message related to buffer storage if so you might want to try use the metal to vecuken wrapper to help with speed. If you don't have this because of OS or graphic limit yoi migjt be better off using bootcamp with windows. On phone so any error are likely because of that.

First, let's cover the basics.

https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#why-do...late-old-c

FAQ Wrote:Why do I need such a powerful computer to emulate an old console?

While it's true the GameCube and Wii hardware is a lot slower than what you need to emulate the console using Dolphin, the hardware found in these consoles is also very different from what you can find in a gaming PC. For example:

• Instead of an Intel or AMD x86 CPU, GameCube and Wii use an IBM PowerPC CPU. Games are programmed for this CPU: when emulating, every basic instruction a game runs needs to be translated to something a PC can execute. Depending on the instruction, this can take from 2x to 100x clock cycles, which explains why you need more than a 486MHz CPU to emulate a GameCube.
  
  
• The RAM in these consoles is SRAM, smaller but faster than the SDRAM used in a PC. It is also shared between CPU and GPU, which makes operations like texture uploads (CPU memory to GPU memory) or framebuffer copies (GPU memory to CPU memory) a lot less demanding than they are on a PC.
  
  
• The GPU is not using shaders: every graphics effect and every computation done by the game is executed directly by the hardware without an intermediate programming language. This does not match how a PC GPU works at all. Dolphin uses shaders on the PC GPU to translate what the GC GPU can do directly in hardware, causing it to run a lot slower.
  
  
• A PC runs an operating system in order to be able to run several programs at the same time. A GameCube or a Wii does not have the same requirement and can directly execute things on the hardware without going through the operating system, making a lot of communication between chips faster.
  

This list is not exhaustive but should give you a good idea of what exactly makes emulation require a powerful computer.

So here's the thing. As mentioned from the FAQ quote above (you did read that right? Riiiiight?), Dolphin hinges on Single Core performance. So the recipe for good Dolphin performance is IPC (instructions per clock, i.e. how much work it does per cycle) and raw gigahertz (the number of cycles per second). Laptops of the same architecture as a desktop will (more or less) have the same IPC as that desktop, but will have much lower clocks (usually about 2/3rds) and it will struggle to maintain it due to the thermal limitations of the laptop form factor. In fact, it's only within the past few years has it been possible to get fullspeed in most games on a laptop. 8 years ago, it required a desktop with -extreme- overclocks to achieve that.

And that brings us to your MacBook. Being a laptop, its frequency is quite lower already than a desktop, but it being an -old- laptop means it is going to struggle a LOT. Being a Mac doesn't do it any favors either - it is losing a lot of potential performance to either macOS refusing to get buffer storage for OpenGL, or the MoltenVK translation layer. All told, performance wise, it will play some games, but not many. I know, because my old laptop was a 2012 MacBook Pro with a Core i5-3210M. And it doesn't play F-Zero GX fullspeed, like, not even remotely. Here, I can even show you!



It got 25-40fps on average, depending on the stage. Given all of the limitations with this laptop I mentioned before, this is completely expected. You could run Dolphin in Windows via bootcamp to alleviate the graphics API nonsense on macOSO, but you'd still be dealing with inherent CPU limitations of such an old machine. I don't believe that bootcamp would be enough to get F-Zero GX fullspeed, but, I never actually tried it on my 2012 MacBook Pro, so it might! If you really want to run games in Dolphin on that machine I'd recommend that as your next thing to try.