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Optimal Settings for Dolphin - Printable Version

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Optimal Settings for Dolphin - Snorky156 - 12-28-2013

Given my PC's specs, could someone please tell me the optimal settings for Dolphin.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64x
Intel i5 750 2.67 ghz
8 GB Ram
ATI Radeon HD 4350
40 inch Samsung Plasma connected to an HDMI cable

The games I'll be playing are The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, Pokemon Colosseum, Resident Evil 4, and Metroid Prime.


RE: Optimal Settings for Dolphin - JMC47 - 12-28-2013

Your processor, while probably fine for Wind Waker (at least with an Overclock) is not going to like Twilight Princess or Metroid Prime for sure. You will experience slowdown/problems regardless. Pokemon Colosseum and Resident Evil 4 I have less experience with but they don't seem to be hugely resource intensive.

Your graphics card is very weak. I don't know if you'll be able to handle 2x or 3x IR (which is the whole reason to use a big T.V. like that) comfortably. Then again, I'm not very knowledgeable on radeons.

For Wind Waker, you will want to override the INI file and use HLE audio. LLE audio (which fixes a lot of things) is going to be too strenuous for that PC. Twilight Princess will have slowdown no matter what, but the wiki page for that game should help you try to find a balance between it looking good and running optimally.

The other games work perfectly on HLE audio. The default settings should be pretty good for them. I recommend D3D on Radeons because it will give you better performance. Unfortunately that brings glitches to Twilight Princess. To avoid severe lighting errors, you will have to check "skip EFB Access to CPU." That disables some graphical effects but also stops the severe lighting errors.

Metroid Prime is just very tough to run and honestly I don't think it'll run well for you. On a Core i5 3570K at 3.4 GHz I get around 80 - 100 fps during the intro cutscene. Though it's much faster in game, you will be experiencing some slowdown. I hear that the OGL plugin handles the Metroid Prime series better, so you may want to experiment. While you will get slowdown in the games, they may remain playable depending on your definition.


RE: Optimal Settings for Dolphin - admin89 - 12-29-2013

ATi 4350 can't even handle Wii native 480p resolution - 1xIR .
@OP you need to overclock your CPU to 3.6GHz or higher (for the default LLE backend in Zelda WW) and a new GPU like EVGA GTX 650 and may be new PSU as well (power supply such as EVGA 430W or EVGA 500W ) if your current PSU is weak
In order to overclock , you musr have aftermarket cooler (such as CM Hyper 212 Evo) + Arctic MX-4


RE: Optimal Settings for Dolphin - Snorky156 - 12-30-2013

(12-29-2013, 12:21 AM)admin89 Wrote: ATi 4350 can't even handle Wii native 480p resolution - 1xIR .
@OP you need to overclock your CPU to 3.6GHz or higher (for the default LLE backend in Zelda WW) and a new GPU like EVGA GTX 650 and may be new PSU as well (power supply such as EVGA 430W or EVGA 500W ) if your current PSU is weak
In order to overclock , you musr have aftermarket cooler (such as CM Hyper 212 Evo) + Arctic MX-4
Okay so clearly from what I can tell, the video card can't even handle GameCube games. I guess I'll have to wait until I make a new pc to play GameCube games in progressive scan mode. My power supply by the way is a 350 watt so clearly it's underpowered. Thanks for the help.

(12-28-2013, 08:04 PM)JMC47 Wrote: Your processor, while probably fine for Wind Waker (at least with an Overclock) is not going to like Twilight Princess or Metroid Prime for sure. You will experience slowdown/problems regardless. Pokemon Colosseum and Resident Evil 4 I have less experience with but they don't seem to be hugely resource intensive.

Your graphics card is very weak. I don't know if you'll be able to handle 2x or 3x IR (which is the whole reason to use a big T.V. like that) comfortably. Then again, I'm not very knowledgeable on radeons.

For Wind Waker, you will want to override the INI file and use HLE audio. LLE audio (which fixes a lot of things) is going to be too strenuous for that PC. Twilight Princess will have slowdown no matter what, but the wiki page for that game should help you try to find a balance between it looking good and running optimally.

The other games work perfectly on HLE audio. The default settings should be pretty good for them. I recommend D3D on Radeons because it will give you better performance. Unfortunately that brings glitches to Twilight Princess. To avoid severe lighting errors, you will have to check "skip EFB Access to CPU." That disables some graphical effects but also stops the severe lighting errors.

Metroid Prime is just very tough to run and honestly I don't think it'll run well for you. On a Core i5 3570K at 3.4 GHz I get around 80 - 100 fps during the intro cutscene. Though it's much faster in game, you will be experiencing some slowdown. I hear that the OGL plugin handles the Metroid Prime series better, so you may want to experiment. While you will get slowdown in the games, they may remain playable depending on your definition.
So in a nutshell the video card is too weak to handle any of this. Thanks for the help, I guess I'll try Dolphin when I make my new pc with strong enough parts. The only reason I wanted to try Dolphin now is to play my GameCube games in progressive scan mode. But if you're saying my computer can't handle this, I'll try Dolphin with a strong enough pc.


RE: Optimal Settings for Dolphin - bat2com - 01-01-2014

My advice is to be careful on overclocking your cpu, if you dont know what you are doing and dont have a good cooling system+good psu+good motherboard+good memories then dont do it, doing oc sounds easy but if you do it wrong you will face constantly crashes and even worst you could damage your cpu..
My advice is if you cant run full speed the games, play then on lower res using lower internal res too that helps a lot.
You dont have a good gpu either so there isnt much you can do sadly.