Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Came across a little Dell oddity called the Wyse 3400 Thin Client. It has a proprietary OS , 2GB of RAM, and a passively cooled Atom X5. It's also Pi sized and I love the form factor Despite it being sold and setup purely for thin client use I have found that anyone who has tried has managed to get Linux running on it with the only resistance being a changed setting in the BIOS. I'm eyeing picking up a used one in the ~$30 range as a micro console/PC.



I'm not expecting any revelatory performance out of it or even full speed emulation on harder to run games but I believe I once managed to get lighter games running on the previous generation "BayTrail" Atom chips in an old Dell Venue 10 pro tablet and by all measures this should outperform that.

Does the Atom x5/Cherry Trail iGPU support the minimum specs to open modern dolphin? Should I expect *any* games to run full speed assuming it meets the minimum requirements to boot?

Assuming it running a 64bit os and version of linux supported by dolphin you should be a able to boot dolphin and games. That said I don't imagine it running at full speed or any decent speed for that matter. My sister pentium berry trail which ran at higher clock and it didn't run dolphin well at all, even lighter games like windwaker. Berry cherry trail isn't much better in performance and this was a higher clock cpu.

First off, it's Atom. Not designed even for the slightest of casual gaming.

And second... even my old (and crappy) A6 APU gets a couple of miles away from it (despite having even lower single-core performance).

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Int...s876vs1908

(06-09-2020, 07:11 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: [ -> ]First off, it's Atom. Not designed even for the slightest of casual gaming.

And second... even my old (and crappy) A6 APU gets a couple of miles away from it (despite having even lower single-core performance).

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Int...s876vs1908

I mean isn't single core most important in Dolphin? How well/bad does your laptop do?

I think you mean the Wyse 3040? Not to derail your thoughts but I need something exactly like this for a project, so I just bought one on Ebay, thanks!

I ran Dolphin about 2 years ago on a Z8350 on fanless mini computer. It was terrible, and SMS didn't run full speed. Then the computer overheated and shutdown by the time I picked up FLUDD. It was a terrible time. I will however benchmark this for you when it comes in later this week. I'll be installing whatever I can get to install on the system, probably Debian or Ubuntu, maybe CentOS. Need to see what distro is easily supported by the software I'm trying to run.

edit: as for performance, it's gonna suck. The Z8350 is ~3x weaker in single core than an i3-3217U. So, use that knowledge as you will in the meantime.

SC performance is one thing. Other part is GPU. According to this https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Atom...868.0.html that atom has intel hd 5300 type gpu dx12/ogl 4.4 on windows. On linux ogl version may be higher depend on drivers. According to the site its performance is about Qualcomm Adreno 330.

Back to cpu. It has SSE 4.2 and again according co notebookcheck site it offers a performance similar to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801. Not sure how adequate this comparison is. SoC may behave better with linux on it than with android.

Some yt videos may be useful too.

(06-09-2020, 03:17 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]I think you mean the Wyse 3040? Not to derail your thoughts but I need something exactly like this for a project, so I just bought one on Ebay, thanks!

I ran Dolphin about 2 years ago on a Z8350 on fanless mini computer. It was terrible, and SMS didn't run full speed. Then the computer overheated and shutdown by the time I picked up FLUDD. It was a terrible time. I will however benchmark this for you when it comes in later this week. I'll be installing whatever I can get to install on the system, probably Debian or Ubuntu, maybe CentOS. Need to see what distro is easily supported by the software I'm trying to run.

edit: as for performance, it's gonna suck. The Z8350 is ~3x weaker in single core than an i3-3217U. So, use that knowledge as you will in the meantime.

Hey me to maybe I'll get mine before you

I appreciate the feedback I'm wondering if I can stick a spare pi fan I have in it and power it someway to get it to consistently turbo.

(06-09-2020, 09:09 AM)bomblord Wrote: [ -> ]I mean isn't single core most important in Dolphin? How well/bad does your laptop do?

Well, the crappiest one (with the A6 APU) struggled to run even Luigi´s Mansion at fullspeed. 

The old-but-not-so-crappy and current one (with the i7-2640M) had fair performance. Super Mario Sunshine used to run nicely even with the 60 FPS patch. I also remember heavier games like Super Mario Galaxy running without that much of a hassle (provided that CPU to EFB Access was disabled though).

Since current builds of Dolphin no longer support my HD3000, can't really tell about how good my current laptop fares with those (also the reason why I'm referring to it in past tense).

EDIT: Yes, Single-Core performance matters the most in Dolphin.

Finally here's my follow-up: as expected this sucks for Dolphin. Even with a 12V case fan stuck on the top to help cool it, Dolphin is not happy. I copied my games to the internal 16GB storage one game at a time, and was using Ubuntu 18.04. I compiled Dolphin from source (which takes forever) for all testing, and re-ran the tests today just to be thorough. All my testing was at default settings.

Here's some lightweight/popular games I tested:
Wind Waker: ~15-20 fps
New SMB: ~12 fps
Super Mario Sunshine: ~10 fps

Hardwired Gigabit connection and using Steam In-home streaming from my gaming PC also sucked. It was very finicky to setup properly, and it still caused massive lag every 30-60 seconds. This might be ok for games that don't require fast-paced action, but for Rocket League it was terrible.