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Fps?!?

wink

New member
As i can see in the many screenshots and from what ive experienced, all games run at very low FPS. Is it the hardware that is not strong enough yet or its some kinda problem thats solvable trough code in a next version?
 

Knuckles

Active member
Moderator
a bit of both. the emu core isn't perfect. and the current personnal systems are also a bit too slow to handle emulated PPC CPUs.
 

DR.BETRUGER

Banned
I dont think that the current machines are not fast enough. The gamecube processor runs at 400 mhz only, But the best pc processor right now runs at 4. ghz. So i think that a Dual -core processor, will do the job right? Personaly i believe that we will be able to run the emulator with full speed, when the core will be complete right?
 

General Plot

Britchie Crazy
OK, I love these threads that attempt to compare emulating a console solely based on CPU clock speeds. This is when someone can come in and inform the rest of the people that don't know about what a difficult task emulating a next gen console can be. There's simply more to it than just going down the Mhz line, so to break it down, here's a general idea:

Comparisons:

PC: Generally a 32 or 64 bit environement. Athlon 64 X2 has around 5.5-6 Giga FLOPS at peak.

Gamecube: A 128 bit IBM Power PC "Gekko" 485 MHz, 13 Giga FLOPS at peak.

This simple comparison only shows a small example of the total picture. On top of the fact that the GC has a 128 bit CPU (128 bit registers which is double or quadruple that of a PC) the floating point operations (Giga FLOPS) is about double that of what one of the most powerful CPU's is capable of. If this doesn't explain enough about how difficult this can be, I can always gather more tech info, but this should give you some idea why the Mhz myth isn't enough.:p Combine this with inefficient code that is still a bit buggy, and low FPS shouldn't come as a surprise at all.
 
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DR.BETRUGER

Banned
Yes, but i have heard that the Dual-core cpus, are more powerful than the Athlon 64 bit. Is it true? Has anyone try to run the emu with a dual-core cpu? I think that a dual core cpu will run dolphin faster than a Athlon 64, right?
 

General Plot

Britchie Crazy
DR.BETRUGER said:
Yes, but i have heard that the Dual-core cpus, are more powerful than the Athlon 64 bit. Is it true? Has anyone try to run the emu with a dual-core cpu? I think that a dual core cpu will run dolphin faster than a Athlon 64, right?
You're missing the whole point. HT or dual core will not have much effect on speed at all. In order for this to work, the code would have to be optimized to use 2 separate cores or threads, and even then, the performance gain wouldn't be very substantial. Quite frankly, the time it would take to optimize the source for multi threading just isn't worth it. There's not enough to be gained from it to make it feasable. Even if you were to do this, you'd still only be using a CPU that has either 32 or 64 bit registers. And peak floating point operations would not increase by much, so the bottleneck is still there.
 

PsyMan

Just Another Wacko ;)
DR.BETRUGER said:
Yes, but i have heard that the Dual-core cpus, are more powerful than the Athlon 64 bit. Is it true? Has anyone try to run the emu with a dual-core cpu? I think that a dual core cpu will run dolphin faster than a Athlon 64, right?
No... Every person you ask tells you the exact same thing. Dolphin will not run faster on current machines right now. That's because neither Dolphin nor the current PC hardware are evolved enough. This is not going to change despite the number of times you ask.

The developers of Dolphin have better things to do than coding an emulator 24 hours per day. They code because they simply want to. When they don't want to code anymore they stop. There is no reason for that. It's like eating the same food every day... When you don't want to eat it again you eat something else.

If you want so much to run games fullspeed learn programing and code an emu yourself or better, just go and buy a GameCube.

In every single post you make it seems like you haven't read what everyone else told you earlier. This is rude to every person who replied to you and makes you look immature.

I don't want to reach this point, but if you continue like this we'll be forced to stop you using means other than posting.
 

DOGG

New member
generalplot said:
Athlon 64 X2 has around 5.5-6 Giga FLOPS at peak
DR.BETRUGER said:
Yes, but i have heard that the Dual-core cpus, are more powerful than the Athlon 64 bit. Is it true? Has anyone try to run the emu with a dual-core cpu? I think that a dual core cpu will run dolphin faster than a Athlon 64, right?
The Athlon 64 X2 IS a dual-core processor. Besides, it sounds like you don't know very much. Just because the CPU has 2 cores doesn't mean you instantly get 2x performance. In fact in most things you wouldn't even get ANY performance boost.
 
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ector

Emulator Developer
Although one of my plans for this spring is to build myself a dual core computer... If I find some time I might try to tear off the graphics processing into a separate thread. I'm pretty sure it can be done and would give some speed boost. No promises though :)
 

DR.BETRUGER

Banned
ector said:
Although one of my plans for this spring is to build myself a dual core computer... If I find some time I might try to tear off the graphics processing into a separate thread. I'm pretty sure it can be done and would give some speed boost. No promises though :)

Wow!! This is the greatest idea i have ever heard!! It is true that if the graphic processing is into a separate thread, then cpu, will not have so much things to do, so this wil be increase speed a lot. Congratulations and good work!!!
 

General Plot

Britchie Crazy
DR.BETRUGER said:
Wow!! This is the greatest idea i have ever heard!! It is true that if the graphic processing is into a separate thread, then cpu, will not have so much things to do, so this wil be increase speed a lot. Congratulations and good work!!!
Here's a note, before you go getting all excited: PCSX2 is trying to put some of the graphics rendering on a separate thread for this same reason, and you know what? Hardly a speed increase.
 

BlueFalcon7

New member
just a question, is the gekko CPU in the GCN really a 128 bit processor, because if it is that explains the problem of being slow. But another problem with the GC emus, is that they emulate the wrong thing, they emulate all the files, and take commands. The info on how to run the files is all in the .dol (the executable) in the case of PC games, an .exe. All games work that way no matter what platform they run on, but small games, which all the info is in the executable like most roms which are usually only a few megabytes. in short, the .dol is the only thing thats supposed to be emulated, emulate that and your good.
 

TerraPhantm

New member
FLOPS aren't everything, there's an article on Anandtech that explains why the XBOX360 CPU, which is capable of 1 Terra FLOP, is still an inferior processor to the Athlon 64 and P4. Also the XBOX CPU IS a Celeron running at 733MHz, and yet the Xbox is more powerful then the gamecube.

I believe the coding issue is more with the PPC processors being RISC, while x86 computers are CISC. I guess theoretically it'd be easier to emulate the gamecube on a mac, because they both have PPC processors.

Also you will not see much of a performance increase for SMP apps with hyperthreading. Hyperthreading just creates a logical core with the extremely long processing pipe that P4s have. The P4D and Athlon64 X2 however have two PHYSICAL cores which are nearly as efficient as two physical processors
 
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DR.BETRUGER

Banned
TerraPhantm said:
FLOPS aren't everything, there's an article on Anandtech that explains why the XBOX360 CPU, which is capable of 1 Terra FLOP, is still an inferior processor to the Athlon 64 and P4. Also the XBOX CPU IS a Celeron running at 733MHz, and yet the Xbox is more powerful then the gamecube.

I believe the coding issue is more with the PPC processors being RISC, while x86 computers are CISC. I guess theoretically it'd be easier to emulate the gamecube on a mac, because they both have PPC processors.

Also you will not see much of a performance increase for SMP apps with hyperthreading. Hyperthreading just creates a logical core with the extremely long processing pipe that P4s have. The P4D and Athlon64 X2 however have two PHYSICAL cores which are nearly as efficient as two physical processors

So you say that the Athlon 64 x2 are powerful enough to emulate the XBOX 360??
 

bohdy

New member
generalplot said:
OK, I love these threads that attempt to compare emulating a console solely based on CPU clock speeds. This is when someone can come in and inform the rest of the people that don't know about what a difficult task emulating a next gen console can be. There's simply more to it than just going down the Mhz line, so to break it down, here's a general idea:

Comparisons:

PC: Generally a 32 or 64 bit environement. Athlon 64 X2 has around 5.5-6 Giga FLOPS at peak.

Gamecube: A 128 bit IBM Power PC "Gekko" 485 MHz, 13 Giga FLOPS at peak.

This simple comparison only shows a small example of the total picture. On top of the fact that the GC has a 128 bit CPU (128 bit registers which is double or quadruple that of a PC) the floating point operations (Giga FLOPS) is about double that of what one of the most powerful CPU's is capable of. If this doesn't explain enough about how difficult this can be, I can always gather more tech info, but this should give you some idea why the Mhz myth isn't enough.:p Combine this with inefficient code that is still a bit buggy, and low FPS shouldn't come as a surprise at all.

Just full of these "facts" aren't you.

In actuality, the X2 has a peak thoroughput closer to 20 GFLOPS, and the Gekko is a (mostly) 32-bit cpu with a peak throughput of close to 2 GLOPS.

You really should do more research before misinforming others.

Anyway, the problem of emulating as system cannot be explained so easily with arbitrary statistics like mhz or FLOP count.
 

DR.BETRUGER

Banned
I will buy a Athlon X2!! I think that it is the only proccesor that can run dolphin full speed. In my opininion i think that maybe the problem is that the emulator is not complete right? I think that we must all waiting until the emulator is complete. Then we will be able to run all games, at full speed i believe.
 

TerraPhantm

New member
DR.BETRUGER said:
So you say that the Athlon 64 x2 are powerful enough to emulate the XBOX 360??
It doesn't have enough power to emulate, because the architectures of the two processors are completely different, it'd take more then raw power to emulate it. As bohdy said, emulation is dependent on things other then FLOPS and MHz.

Also don't keep your hopes up for the Athlon64 X2 running dolphin at full speed, I have one with an overclock that few people are able to get and I get the same speeds as everyone else. If they design the emulator to be multithreaded, maybe some more games will be playable, but it is rather hard to code an effective multithreaded app.
 

DR.BETRUGER

Banned
And maybe a xbox 360 emulator, will need more cpu power to run, So even if dolphin works ok with multithread ( when they do the emulator multithread) xbox 360 will need a more powerful cpu than that to run at full speed, because it prossecor is more powerful than the gamecube. Heh it will be cool to play the next gen concole games on the pc!
 

BlueFalcon7

New member
TerraPhantm said:
FLOPS aren't everything, there's an article on Anandtech that explains why the XBOX360 CPU, which is capable of 1 Terra FLOP, is still an inferior processor to the Athlon 64 and P4. Also the XBOX CPU IS a Celeron running at 733MHz, and yet the Xbox is more powerful then the gamecube.

I believe the coding issue is more with the PPC processors being RISC, while x86 computers are CISC. I guess theoretically it'd be easier to emulate the gamecube on a mac, because they both have PPC processors.

Also you will not see much of a performance increase for SMP apps with hyperthreading. Hyperthreading just creates a logical core with the extremely long processing pipe that P4s have. The P4D and Athlon64 X2 however have two PHYSICAL cores which are nearly as efficient as two physical processors

dual core processors are actually more efficent than dual processors (at least thats what everyone has told me) and another question how many GHz equal a GFLOP assuming they are both 32 bit?
 

TerraPhantm

New member
GFLOPS can not be converted to GHz, and FLOPS are a useless value to benchmark with because the complexity of the calculations could change everything. An Athlon 64 FX-57 runs at "only" 2.8GHz, but is arguably the fastest processor out there. I know the Athlon 64 is 64-bit, but the latest P4s are also 64-bit, and it doesn't make a difference when running a 32-bit OS.

The 360 will most definitely need a faster computer, consoles in the next generation are extremely close to power to top-end PCs (the graphics processors are actually more powerful), so the first emulator might take even longer to create then it did for this generation.
 

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