CPU vs. GFX

[Nahuel]

A simple question:
why Dolphin only uses the CPU power????
I mean. It dons´t mather what graphic card do you have.

I am wrong???

 

[spartan]

u need a good graphics card and a fast cpu for dolphin.

 

[Sercio]

A emulator translates 2 cpu languages. Imagine you need to translate chinese to english with a dictionary which is time consuming!
Our computer has x86 cpu´s and the Gamecube uses a powerpc cpu!
The graphic emulation part is quite well made on dolphin! Using directx saves alot ressource...

 

[Toasty]

The reason the CPU needs to be so powerful and the graphics card can be relatively weak is that the CPU is the one doing all the emulation. When the graphics card draws graphics, it doesn't 'know' those graphics are coming from an emulator. The CPU has already done all the work of translating the game's graphics code into DirectX (hopefully OpenGL in the future, as well) function calls, so the graphics card displays the emulated game the same way it displays any graphics - it doesn't have to emulate anything. And since Gamecube graphics are fairly dated, most decent graphics cards can handle Gamecube graphics, as long as they support the features required by the graphics plugin.

 

[Nahuel]

The reason the CPU needs to be so powerful and the graphics card can be relatively weak is that the CPU is the one doing all the emulation. When the graphics card draws graphics, it doesn't 'know' those graphics are coming from an emulator. The CPU has already done all the work of translating the game's graphics code into DirectX (hopefully OpenGL in the future, as well) function calls, so the graphics card displays the emulated game the same way it displays any graphics - it doesn't have to emulate anything. And since Gamecube graphics are fairly dated, most decent graphics cards can handle Gamecube graphics, as long as they support the features required by the graphics plugin.

you have right, but the gfx can do something more???
i mean: the gfx can translate the game´s graphics code???

 

[heftig]

Depends, I guess.

• The latest graphic cards are extremely powerful general purpose FPUs.
• PCIe allows for very fast data transfer between GPU and CPU.

If there are lots of floating point operations, letting the graphics cards handle them could speed up emulation.

 

[LelandStanford]

You will still run into bottlenecks regardless of the FPU given the CPU process load.

 

[Olly]

Couldn't you just split the work between the two somehow? Surely that would really speed it up?

 

[[SS] Starscream]

They should fix PCSX2 so it won't need a monster graphics card. Gamecube graphics are better than the PS2 graphics and if it can be done here it can be done there.