Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

My old (bought it in release week) wii bit the dust just after xmas. I had been planning to put together a machine to run dolphin for a while, but this event forced my hand a bit!

I didn't have a ton of money to spend, but a few youtube videos and a bit of forum hunting led me to believe that a 6th gen i3-6100 with 8gb of ram should allow dolphin to run pretty smoothly at native resolution, without too many graphical enhancements. I wanted something that would fit in our tv cabinet, so i bought a barebones used Dell optiplex 3050, put 8gb of ram, an ssd and a 1tb hdd in, and its up and running great. I managed to rip my wii game collection while waiting for it to arrive, and i can so far at least get the games to boot and run.

Dolphin performance isn't amazing though, despite following threads on here to optimise performance. It seems to work ok with some of the less graphically demanding games, though i'm struggling to test things too thoroughly as i cant get a wiimote to connect with the cheap generic bluetooth dongle i bought (but that's another story for another time...). A reasonably demanding game like super mario galaxy however, rarely gets above 85% speed, and is sluggish enough that its not enjoyable to play.

My ideal end point would be to be able to play all the games in my library at at least 720p at full speed, maybe with some antialiasing switched on. Ive come in under budget so far, so with a little bit more money to spend, I'm canvassing opinions as to what the next hardware upgrade should be...

The logical options (tell me if i'm mistaken please) seem to be:

1) fit a graphics card. The desktop unit is small form factor, and the size of the case and weak, non replaceable psu are an issue in this regard. Googling around seems to indicate the best i could hope to use without too much hassle is a geforce gt 1030 half height, low power card.

2) replace the cpu with another LGA1151 processor like the i5-6500 3.2ghz. Because more cores is better, huh?

Either item would be bought used. (There's also another RAM slot..?)
The dell motherboard does not allow the CPU to be overclocked, as far as i can tell.

The second of the two options is cheaper, but i've never replaced a processor before. I'd back myself to do it, but its slightly more nerve wracking. I'm also unsure whether a graphics card would be bottlenecked by the performance of the weaker, dual core i3 cpu that i currently have.

Does anyone have any thoughts? I've never assembled a PC before, and to be honest i'm already riding at the very limits of my understanding and ability. Ive come this far though, so i wont give up. Id like to know what people think the best way to proceed for maximum peformance GAINZ would be

Thanks in advance for your opinions, I've been lurking these forums for a while without registering, you seem to have a great community here

cheers,

DaftOldDude

If you run the games at native resolution with no upscaling or enhancements, do you have slowdown problems? If yes, then you might need a faster CPU. If no, then your CPU is fast enough, and any enhancements you want to use mean you need a faster GPU. The 1030 isn't too expensive on ebay and should get to 720p or more in some games.

If you upgrade your CPU to the i5-6500 you actually lose some single core speed because you're dropping from 3.7Ghz to base 3.2Ghz with max boost of 3.6Ghz. If you need to upgrade the CPU, I'd recommend the i5-7500 instead, as it costs about the same but has better clock speed than the i5-6500. The i3-7300 has the highest clock speed but is also the most expensive, but it's the fastest CPU that Dell says is compatible with the Optiplex 3050 SFF. If you want to take a risk, you could get the i5-7600, its not explicitly called out as supported but it fits in the 65W TDP so it should work, and can beat the i3-7300 at max boost of 4.1Ghz

I'm slightly late on this, but are you're just running on the integrated graphics? If so, does the PC only have 1 stick of RAM rather than 2?

Thing is, running two identical sticks of RAM is very important for the performance of integrated graphics, and faster RAM also equals better integrated GPU performance (up to a point anyway; also two slow sticks of RAM will outperform one fast stick of RAM).


Another thing is that it isn't clear what OS the PC is running, but Intel integrated graphics tend to have a substantially better time on Linux. Luckily getting Dolphin running on a "baby's first Linux" like Linux Mint is pretty darned simplistic (just search for Dolphin in Mint's built-in software manager and choose the Flatpak version of Dolphin) and, as a side bonus, if you have the official 1st party gamecube USB adapter, it's much easier to get working on Linux than on Windows.

(and while I'm on the subject, SteamOS 3.0 should be available at some point in the near-ish future as a free download for general-purpose PCs, so that's always an option for basically creating your own "permanently-docked Steam Deck" which, yes, Dolphin is also available on via the aforementioned flatpak verison)

...also if it's something like Windows 10 or 11, then honestly I wouldn't exactly feel comfortable with only 8GB of RAM and a 2core/4thread CPU, while something like Linux or *gasp* Windows 7 tends to run plenty fine on even 4GB or less RAM and a 2core/2thread CPU.


Lastly, it's at least worth mentioning that, as soon as a low-end discrete GPU gets involved, the monetary value proposition becomes questionable in comparison to modern integrated graphics solutions, especially since Dolphin (and emulation in general) tends to care more about CPU grunt, so modern CPUs using integrated graphics with dual-channel RAM tend to perform better than older CPUs paired with lower-end discrete GPUs unless you're running at particularly high-resolutions (e.g. 4k).

To the two knowledgeable posters who gave up their time to provide two detailed answers - thank you both very much.

I've learned a lot. Just running one stick of ram at the moment (on windows 10) - I'll buy another, then benchmark my machine before and after installing, and see if performance is better. The pc will not be used for anything else, so I guess an OS change would not hurt either.

Interesting to hear that dolphin only runs on one core d so it's outright clock speed that matters most to running at at higher frame rates. I could buy a used i5-7500 from eBay for about £50, and sell the i3 for about £35 so a relatively cheap upgrade

Thanks again for your hero, you'll find me browsing RAM on the internet if you need me

Dual channel RAM will be a big improvement to the integrated graphics and OS usage in general

(03-10-2022, 02:04 AM)DaftOldDude Wrote: [ -> ]Just running one stick of ram at the moment (on windows 10) - I'll buy another

It's usually recommended to try to buy a second stick of the exact same model of RAM that you already have. If you can't do that, then the next best thing is to try getting one that is as close as possible with regards to speed and timings.

And of course, the last-ditch option is to just straight-up buy a 2x8GB kit of RAM and remove your existing RAM altogether... though, if you're willing to swap OSes, then even 2x4GB could work (but the price difference on eBay compared to 2x8GB is minimal nowadays).

(03-10-2022, 02:04 AM)DaftOldDude Wrote: [ -> ]I could buy a used i5-7500 from eBay for about £50, and sell the i3 for about £35 so a relatively cheap upgrade

Indeed that's cheap and technically would be an upgrade in terms of hardware specs but, other than the difference in core count, the underlying architecture and per-GHz performance is identical save for differences in cache size (which admittedly does help a bit in Dolphin). This is key because the i5-7500 basically offers no upgrade in clockspeed and, if anything, might actually be slightly slower because the i3-6100 always runs at 3.7GHz while the i5-7500 has a maximum short-duration turbo speed of 3.8GHz.

So if you're not running many if any tasks in the background, then the additional cores of the i5-7500 actually may not provide much if any benefit - heck even the integrated graphics is basically the same other than some updated video decode and output support.

Besides, regarding an OS change, I wouldn't be surprised if that alone negates any performance benefit that the i5's additional cores provide with regards to Dolphin (in other words, I'm saying that Win10/11 has enough background services that it may actually hamper Dolphin performance a bit on the i3-6100).

Also technically Dolphin commonly can use two cores, but in practice this isn't really an issue since single-core CPUs haven't really been a thing on PCs for a decade now.

(02-26-2022, 12:08 AM)DaftOldDude Wrote: [ -> ]an ssd and a 1tb hdd

Slightly off-topic, but hopefully you had one or both of those around already or got a really cheap deal? Basically the pricing on SSDs is low enough nowadays that the price of a low-capacity SSD + 1TB HDD is not that far removed from a single 1TB SSD on its own (even if it's an entry-level SSD; DRAM-less SSDs are still definitely better than mechanical hard drives!).