(05-04-2014, 05:27 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]Wasn't it proved those compiler time "optimizations" were snakeoil? Such as builds either ran the same without the so called performance benefits being reproducible every time, in some cases broke the emulator or caused worse performance? There is literally no reason to use other builds than the official vanilla builds now unless some coder/developer offers builds to test improvements and new features.
Don't the performance intensive parts of Dolphin already use the appropriate optimizations? I thought there was in-line assembly being used for the JIT recompiler.
It seems like these builds are just a money grab that feed off people's desperation (which is the vast majority of users at the time) for any kind of speed boost to shill donations and adlinking the binaries. I doubt the site will be back since word is out that these binaries are no different speed wise from official builds.
That's pretty harsh and kinda off the mark (by a lot really) of why people such as Lectrode made these builds. Sure people used to think there was speed boost to be had, but simply hosting it on a site with ads didn't make anyone a shill. That's definitely not the vibe that any one providing these sort custom builds ever gave off. They did it because they really liked Dolphin and thought that everyone should have access to the fastest possible revisions (even if the "optimizations" were misguided). Though these builds have fallen out of style, there's really no reason to disparage the maintainers as for-profit swindlers.
Then again, what do I know about how Dolphin is optimized or how the code is implemented or improved. I'm just a user, what goes on in the inner workings of Dolphin is beyond my knowledge, I don't know how much these builds really improved on speed, so I'll refrain from voicing my opinion, other than the fact that I hope my PC can run Dolphin for yet a while longer, esp as it gets more accurate.
nintendo_nerd Wrote:I don't know how much these builds really improved on speed
Every recorded test ever done showed no speedup +/- 2% (within the boundaries of normal variation).
(05-12-2014, 04:22 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]nintendo_nerd Wrote:I don't know how much these builds really improved on speed
Every recorded test ever done showed no speedup +/- 2% (within the boundaries of normal variation).
Damn...didn't know it was like that, guess it was a placebo effect after all. Here's to hoping my PC will be able to run Dolphin decently for a while yet (as in, without me having to upgrade anytime soon)
I remember doing some testing to find out if there was an increase in performance using the equivalent of -march=native in MSVC and ICC on a 4770K. After a decent amount of runs with multiple benchmarks, I determined that there was an average speedup of ~2%. I don't have the calculations anymore, but I did enough runs that the difference was statistically significant. So it's not a placebo, but you probably wouldn't notice the speedup unless you were specifically testing for it.
It possibly is placebo if you only tried on one computer