Why so slow?

[camarinox]

It looks beautiful, and way to go for a good job but...
Why is the speed decreasing?
I think that speed optimization should be top priority, now that everything looks great...
It doesn't help if the game looks flawless but plays on 0.8fps...
Why not focus EVERYTHING on speed optimization?

note: this is not a rant / whatever, I just can't understand why people are thrilled / want to get their hands on the new version, if all the games are way too slow..?

maybe its the way that the code is written, or just the way that the time and development has lead the to, or if they wanted that way. i dont know, but im very happy with the results, and think about this, i prefer an emulator that runs slow but its very compatible, that an emulator that runs fast end emulates 2 or 3 games, just be patient, (the wolrd wasnt made from night to morning). ^^ and we (or just me) are triggered cause the emu its a piece on art, and every modification taht immproves it, deserves a a price.

keep he good work devs!!

 

[Agozer]

the "next-gen" (although now they are curren't-gen, so to speak) are not for palying games, but rather a test of skill for the developers. The current consoles that are emulated (Playstation 2 and the GameCube) have far too powerful hardware to be emulated at full-speed on current computers.

It's all about just emulating the hardware, and succeeding in doing so at least with some accuracy. And getting games to run on an emulator with graphics and all is a pretty damn good proof of accuracy. This is what I think.

 

[Yaj3221]

Speed Of Emulation

I Know The Speed Is Crap but, I Did A Comparision Between Dolphin Teaser & Dolphin 1.03 Beta 1 The Emulation Speed On Dolphin Teaser 4 to 5 X's Faster Than Dolphin 1.03 Beta 1 With The Same Stability Within Games.

So An idea Is Use Some Of The Code from Dolphin Teaser To Improve The Emulation Speed In The Next Version Of Dolphin.:bouncy: arty:

My Specs
----------------
Cpu: Amd Duron 1.1 GHZ @ 1.4 GHZ
Graphics: Geforce FX 5200 THD, Latest Drivers Installed
Sound: Onboard AC79 Standard Audio, SBPCI Synthiziser & Microsoft GS Wavetable
Synthizizer
Memory: 512Mb SDRAM Kingston
Hard Disks: x1 Segate Baracuda 20GB
x1 Segate Baracuda II 40GB
CD/DVD: x1 Acer DVD - ROM Drive
x1 Acer CDRW Drive
MotherBoard: GA-7VXP+, Latest VIA 4 in 1 Drivers Installed

 

[Shinigamiv7]

It's not a matter of re-using old code and replacing the advancements with it. It's logical for newer versions of Dolphin to run slower, as new features have been introduced to the code and more lines have to be processed for each function (and the number of functions increasing as well).
And I'm willing to bet there have been some speed improvements on it, or else it would be running much slower than it is.

To sum it up: more features supported = more code lines to be processed = more cpu processing time used

 

[Mouser X]

For speed vs. compatibility, I'd go for compatiblility. If the emulator runs every GC game perfectly but runs at 1fps, I say good job! Just give PCs time to catch up. They will eventually.

Of course, even if the emulator had 100% compatibility to all GC games, but only ran at 1fps, I wouldn't use it. I'd use another emulator that ran the game I wanted to play faster. But, once the PC gets fast enough, I'd use the more compatible emulator for sure. It's sort of like it was a few years ago with emulators. Some games run better on different emulators. So, to get the most comptability, you'd need 3-4 different emulators, and switch between them depending on the game you're trying to play.

I must say that I haven't used any GC emulators at all, so I really don't know how things are going for them. But, the screenshots look nice. I think I'm going to have to try some of these out... (I have some GC images because I'm interested in the audio files they contain)

Anyway, what I've seen, and read, looks good. Keep up the good work guys. Good luck with this, and hopefully we'll also see some speed increases soon enough. Mouser X over and out.

 

[Doomulation]

Speaking for myself, what I would do if I were they, I would put my priority on compability. I did write a chip8 emulator and I know how it's like to actually build one. It's much more fun to make more games work rather than sit and look through your code to optimize it.
The goal is to emulate and make the games work, not optimizing code to make it fast. If you want to play, you can use the console. But to actually make something work on a completely different architecture--now that's what I say an emulator is all about and that alone is what makes them special and worthwhile.

 

[ChaosCode]

I Know The Speed Is Crap but, I Did A Comparision Between Dolphin Teaser & Dolphin 1.03 Beta 1 The Emulation Speed On Dolphin Teaser 4 to 5 X's Faster Than Dolphin 1.03 Beta 1 With The Same Stability Within Games.

So An idea Is Use Some Of The Code from Dolphin Teaser To Improve The Emulation Speed In The Next Version Of Dolphin.:bouncy: arty:

My Specs
----------------
Cpu: Amd Duron 1.1 GHZ @ 1.4 GHZ
Graphics: Geforce FX 5200 THD, Latest Drivers Installed
Sound: Onboard AC79 Standard Audio, SBPCI Synthiziser & Microsoft GS Wavetable
Synthizizer
Memory: 512Mb SDRAM Kingston
Hard Disks: x1 Segate Baracuda 20GB
x1 Segate Baracuda II 40GB
CD/DVD: x1 Acer DVD - ROM Drive
x1 Acer CDRW Drive
MotherBoard: GA-7VXP+, Latest VIA 4 in 1 Drivers Installed

With more combat comes lower speed and there is nothing you can do about it. The reason is this. They add more opcodes to the emulator but they havnt added them to the recomlyer yet. After completing all the opcodes im sure f|res will work on the recomp but for now you will have to deal with it.

 

[BlueFalcon7]

i got a question, suppose someone made a magical program to convert .dol to .exe or .dmg, would the games run faster assuming that the exe could boot all of the files in the iso correctly or if someone something to boot the game as if it were a PC game?

 

[Agozer]

No, it wouldn't run faster. That would need direct porting to PC.

 

[narg]

It's amazing how many people do not understand basic computing. I'm not bashing, but you need to know how they work.

Consider a PC running 3.0 Gigahertz. That 3,000,000 instructions per second. Consider an instruction, say like a simple "take this memory location and put it in that memory location" (called a "MOV" or move in machine language.) Now if one processor has an instruction that requires software to translate it, then you've possibly increased the number of cycles eaten away by an instruction 100 fold. Instead of taking 1 clock to run a "MOV" (or any other instruction.) it now takes 100 as the translator decides how to do that instruction with other non-native instructions, run those set of instructions, then figure out how to tell the native program that it did what it was asked to do.

Now consider the extremely complex instructions in a modern processor, like that in the GC. Add, that most emulators are written in high level languages that have a lot of "house cleaning" duties on top of the raw code execution. Slow? This emulator is FAST! IMHO.

 

[Shinigamiv7]

Consider a PC running 3.0 Gigahertz. That 3,000,000 instructions per second.

Erm... Wouldn't that rather be 3x10^6 cycles per second? The number of instructions per second would depend on how many instructions can the micro perform per cycle.

That was a good explanation though. ^_^

 

[Doomulation]

1 hz = 1 hz
1 khz = 1000 hz
1 mhz = 10 ^ 6 hz
1 ghz = 10 ^ 9 hz
Anyhow, the clock speeds also implies how many cycles a processor can do per second. Some instructions take more than one cycle. Also the processor must have information from memory in which it must wait several cycles for it to arrive, amongst other factors.
As for the pc... it's architecture is different from consoles, which means that the emulator must take on the work to handle the architecture of the console, so that the pc might work as the console.
Consoles are made for gaming, whileas pcs are made for general purpose. Console processors may have been special built for gaming, having advantages and instructions that pcs don't have. Again, the emulator must make up for this to "emulate" these instructions, because there might not be an equal pc instruction.
We all know windows is a resource hog. Not to mention all the multi-threading! Imagine how much time is lost when windows keeps tracks of all the threads running (there are typically 250+ on every system).
Not to mention everything associated with each thread, which in turn means that it must be restored or disabled as threads switch. And to make it worse, each thread runs for typically some milliseconds.

Now you should have a pretty clear idea why pcs have trouble running consoles.

 

[Alex The Great]

We all know windows is a resource hog. Not to mention all the multi-threading! Imagine how much time is lost when windows keeps tracks of all the threads running (there are typically 250+ on every system).
Not to mention everything associated with each thread, which in turn means that it must be restored or disabled as threads switch. And to make it worse, each thread runs for typically some milliseconds.

Now you should have a pretty clear idea why pcs have trouble running consoles.

So the problem lies in the processors? And other OS like Linux and Mac, also keep track of threads?

 

[Doomulation]

Yes, they do (afaik). They must (again, afaik). Part of the C standard includes threads.
There isn't much wrong with the processors, rather the OS that is sucking most away. And the architecture isn't designed full-fore most for games.

 

[safwatman]

As requested in another forum here is what SSBM looks like the in the new beta,
looks really nice but speed has taken a hit.

when you say it took a hit you mean like that it improved drastically or that it dropped drastically because mine is slow enough as it is now lol i cant even play it without it freezing up

 

[Clements]

Got much slower. This is normal when emulating any system as the compatibility improves.

 

[Alex The Great]

Will there be any speed improvement soon or the speed will always get slower?

 

[Clements]

No one knows this, but my assumption from extrapolating from existing speeds of the various known builds of Dolphin is that it will continue to get slower as the compatibility improves.

Dolphin already uses some advanced methods to speed emulation up such as dynamic recombination (as with N64 emulators), so don't expect a miracle build of Dolphin where everything is fullspeed.

 

[IM0001]

Like a few said before how Dolphin isnt GPU limited... I would think some work could be done later to offset some of the work to the GPU but im guessing that would take tweeking later when you guys get everything working right. Till then this is looking great. Keep it up

If not then we might just need to wait till 08 when intel has thoes QUAD core pocessors coming out. By then we might have vista which supports Multi Core proc and heck maby dolphin could harnes that lol.

 

[Alex The Great]

Intel announced Quad core processors? Won't they make faster processors as usual?