Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I have a very-very old PC. This is the only I can use for Dolphin, so please don't suggest: "You have to upgrade", I just can't.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @3.15 GHz.
At this moment I use a very old GPU, a 2GB implementation of GT 430 by Gigabyte.
I can run many games on Dolphin (especially GC games) at native resolutions fairly good.
I get 30-50 fps, and except some momentary frame-drops, I can call the games I run "playable"
My OS is Linux with OpenGL, and here is the question:

I can get an old GT 710 from a friend for a couple of bucks (lets say 25-30$)
I noticed that this GPU support Vulkan, so I wonder if the combination of slightly better GPU (GT 710) with the Vulkan backend on Linux, will give me better results (namely avoid frame-drops)

Please concentrate on the question, not suggest "You need to upgrade", "You need a better CPU", "You need a better GPU". I don't plan to upgrade.

The question is, according your opinion and your experience, if using a slightly better GPU in combination on Vulkan backend on Linux, can give me a better playing experience on native resolution.

Thank you in advance for your answers and your suggestions.

I doubt a GPU would help you with that very old CPU.

To answer your main question about moving from OpenGL to Vulkan, it's very doubtful that you'd see an improvement on your hardware if you had a GT710. As ExtremeDude2 said, your CPU is too old to adequately run Dolphin at this point. That means your CPU is the bottleneck rather than your GPU. Your CPU is holding back the performance of your system. To illustrate this, you could stick a GTX 3090 in there and it wouldn't make a difference in Dolphin, since the GPU isn't the limiting factor here for your machine.

Your use of Linux should greatly mitigate any downside from needing to use OpenGL.

A bigger problem is that there are two main versions of the 710, the slower of which is actually a weaker GPU as it uses the same Fermi architecture as your 430 but with half the cores and texture units despite having twice the video memory (which Dolphin really doesn't care that much about at 1x internal resolution).

The faster version of the 710 that doesn't use Fermi and instead uses the Kepler architecture will indeed be an upgrade but, as mentioned above, it's questionable how much of your bottleneck is GPU rather than CPU anyway.

GF119 = Fermi (older & slower), GK208 & GK208B = Keplar (newer & faster), and the 710M GF117 was laptop-only:


The only guaranteed way to know which chip your friend's 710 uses is to put it into a PC and run something like GPU-Z and look at the model in the "GPU" field; don't rely on the memory amount for example as that can easily be customized by the AIB AKA Gigabyte, eVGA, etc (considering that you're running Linux, you might want to put Hiren's BootCD PE onto a 4+GB USB drive, ideally via Ventoy because Ventoy is awesome, and boot into that as it includes GPU-Z; either that or maybe GPU-Z can work via WINE directly on Linux?)


That being said I actually wouldn't count out that CPU too-too much if you can manage an overclock since it's a 45nm Wolfdale which has faster per-GHz performance than any Zen-based AMD CPUs and it can pretty easily hit an overclock upwards of 4GHz with sufficient cooling...assuming you know how to actually configure such an overclock and the motherboard even lets you - on Core 2 CPUs it's not as simple as "increase the multiplier".

Also your use of Linux means that you won't have to worry about background OS services hogging your CPU threads (I say this as someone also using a dual-core CPU).

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Honestly a better route may be to look into integrated graphics on any CPU made in the last decade combined with a low-end socketable desktop CPU - my own Pentium G3258 is a CPU that goes for a mere $10 to $15 or so on ebay nowadays, and it not only uses the Haswell architecture (which performed very well in emulation tasks for unknown reasons - see the link in my signature where it's comparable to Ryzen 3000/Zen2) but also has an unlocked multiplier for easy overclocking even on LGA1150 non-Z motherboards (though 8-series boards may require a BIOS update just to even boot so, unless the seller confirmed the BIOS had been updated, 9-series would be safer albeit more expensive, and there's apparently some funny business with the G3258 on Asus H81 boards so Gigabyte or MSI may be safer as well).

The real issue is that replacing the motherboard and possibly the RAM as well as the CPU and heatsink may be out of your budget even if we're talking maybe $50 or a bit more in total (I say "possibly the RAM" because your current CPU ran on motherboards with either DDR2 or DDR3, so if you already have DDR3 memory then you wouldn't even need to buy new RAM... unless it's only 1 stick of RAM as using 2 sticks can definitely help integrated graphics performance).

That being said, Haswell's integrated graphics are even capable of using Vulkan in Dolphin on Linux, not to mention Intel's Linux drivers are actually quite possibly the best graphics drivers in existence across any platform (lack of aspect-preserved scaling notwithstanding).

Thank you all for your detailed answers.
I found them extremely valuable and help me a lot.