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Not surprised at the system requirements- it has to emulate a 486 MHz PowerPC CPU. I have no idea why it would require a discrete GPU though. It only needs to o

by mwfunk 10y ago

Not surprised at the system requirements- it has to emulate a 486 MHz PowerPC CPU. I have no idea why it would require a discrete GPU though. It only needs to output SD-quality video. Maybe shader performance is a limiting factor in the GPU emulations?

pygy_ 10y ago
The graphics are output at arbitrary resolutions, which can be demanding. Also IIRC the GameCube GPU had an architecture different from mainstream PC hardware of the time.
zeta0134 10y ago
That requirement is a bit outdated. At native (not higher than a real gamecube) resolution, I find that the vast majority of games play just fine on Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, and I imagine newer chipsets perform even better. When Dolphin was first released though, Intel graphics were pretty much garbage, so the discrete graphics requirement made sense.
byuu 10y ago
> Not surprised at the system requirements- it has to emulate a 486 MHz PowerPC CPU. Yeah, to anyone who has tried to optimize a CPU interpreter before; dynamic recompilers are nothing short of magical. You'd be quite talented to emulate just a 50 MIPS interpreter core from a sufficiently awkward CPU at 100% speed on modern processors. Let alone all the other parts of the emulator, and synchronization between components. Of course, dynamic recompilers sacrifice huge amounts of synchronization precision in return for that raw speed. But it's very much a necessary evil -- otherwise we wouldn't have playable modern emulators at all. The developers of dynarecs deserve extra special praise for being willing to give up both idealism and portability when writing them.
- delroth 10y ago
  If you sacrifice synchronization you can also hit some pretty good performance with an interpreter. Until fairly recently CEMU was interpreter-only and they managed to hit 100% speed in a few games. The trick: they were running 50K instructions at a time without checking external interrupts or scheduling other components. At least, that's from what I can tell from reverse engineering...
  - byuu 10y ago
    I can only see full speed on a Wii U CPU interpreter happening when the game has huge idle loops that you can skip over. If you're saying they hit it at 100% Wii U CPU load at fullspeed, then that's really impressive! :)

by mwfunk 10y ago

pygy_ 10y ago

The graphics are output at arbitrary resolutions, which can be demanding. Also IIRC the GameCube GPU had an architecture different from mainstream PC hardware of the time.

zeta0134 10y ago

That requirement is a bit outdated. At native (not higher than a real gamecube) resolution, I find that the vast majority of games play just fine on Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, and I imagine newer chipsets perform even better. When Dolphin was first released though, Intel graphics were pretty much garbage, so the discrete graphics requirement made sense.

byuu 10y ago

> Not surprised at the system requirements- it has to emulate a 486 MHz PowerPC CPU. Yeah, to anyone who has tried to optimize a CPU interpreter before; dynamic recompilers are nothing short of magical. You'd be quite talented to emulate just a 50 MIPS interpreter core from a sufficiently awkward CPU at 100% speed on modern processors. Let alone all the other parts of the emulator, and synchronization between components. Of course, dynamic recompilers sacrifice huge amounts of synchronization precision in return for that raw speed. But it's very much a necessary evil -- otherwise we wouldn't have playable modern emulators at all. The developers of dynarecs deserve extra special praise for being willing to give up both idealism and portability when writing them.

delroth 10y ago
If you sacrifice synchronization you can also hit some pretty good performance with an interpreter. Until fairly recently CEMU was interpreter-only and they managed to hit 100% speed in a few games. The trick: they were running 50K instructions at a time without checking external interrupts or scheduling other components. At least, that's from what I can tell from reverse engineering...
- byuu 10y ago
  I can only see full speed on a Wii U CPU interpreter happening when the game has huge idle loops that you can skip over. If you're saying they hit it at 100% Wii U CPU load at fullspeed, then that's really impressive! :)