Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Is it normal that my gpu doesn't recognize dolphin as a "game"?
My core clock stays at idle when I run dolphin (even in full-screen) and eVGA precision is saying that it was only using 25% at most.

I would guess it depends on how powerful your GPU is.
If the game is running fullspeed with the GPU low clocked it should be fine.
If it's causing the game to run slow, maybe it's a driver problem.

It's a bug with newer nvidia drivers, your card is running constantly in low power 3d mode, reducing speed in games.

You have to get rivatuner and force it at constant 3d performance levels (this tweak is disabled by default but go to power user and change a value in the registry to 1 to enable it) while playing games. It may need restart on some versions of forceware.




Without this tweak, forceware 196 and above will underclock the gpu at very low rates (low power 3d) and is not stepping up to perf 3d correctly.

Also installing 196.75 is a very bad idea. It has been reported to even kill gtx cards and it has been removed from nvidia site as a download. http://www.ngohq.com/news/17390-nvidia-f...n-bug.html

(05-31-2010, 08:25 AM)Ocean Wrote: [ -> ]It's a bug with newer nvidia drivers, your card is running constantly in low power 3d mode, reducing speed in games.

You have to get rivatuner and force it at constant 3d performance levels (this tweak is disabled by default but go to power user and change a value in the registry to 1 to enable it) while playing games. It may need restart on some versions of forceware.




Without this tweak, forceware 196 and above will underclock the gpu at very low rates (low power 3d) and is not stepping up to perf 3d correctly.

Also installing 196.75 is a very bad idea. It has been reported to even kill gtx cards and it has been removed from nvidia site as a download. http://www.ngohq.com/news/17390-nvidia-f...n-bug.html

I'm using the 197.45 drivers and the card (gtx 260) has no problem with all my other games (TF2, L4D2, Bad Company 2 etc).

With that fast gfx card, there is a good chance that Dolphin really doesnt use more than 25% of its power. The CPU is prob the limiting component here.

(05-31-2010, 09:18 AM)uniter Wrote: [ -> ]With that fast gfx card, there is a good chance that Dolphin really doesnt use more than 25% of its power. The CPU is prob the limiting component here.

But should the core speeds stay at idle?

Maybe, if idle speed is enough for Dolphin. The original Wii uses the much weaker ATI Hollywood chip with presumably somewhat like 250 MHz and a tiny handfull of RAM - no match for modern gfx cards. If the CPU is maxed out while emulating, it should be fine.

uniter is right, a gtx200 series card/radeon 58xx+ will probably never reach 100% usage during dolphin gameplay.
For clock rates though, it can be irritating if the speed is not bumping to full 3d mode. In which case you need to do the tweak. Wouldn't say it affects gameplay greatly, you'll maybe get 5-10% performance increase if anything at all.

I used riviatuner but I didn't see a noticeable difference. I was looking for a reason why dolphin was running slow for me besides my cpu (C2Q 9550) because I can't over-clock it.

use direct3d plugin on "XP/vista/win7 x64" together with a 64bit version.