Old (6+ years) and/or low end GPUs may struggle, and are not recommended.ĪMD: Any modern mid-range or better AMD GPU will perform well in Dolphin with Ubershaders. NVIDIA: Any modern mid-range or better NVIDIA GPU will be able to play Dolphin in HD resolutions with Ubershaders quite well. If you do not have those extensions, performance will suffer. Dolphin emulates a console that functions very differently from a traditional PC, and uses the latest D3D and OGL features to reduce overhead. However, the biggest thing to watch for is making sure the GPU supports DirectX11.1 and OpenGL 4.4. The more powerful the graphics card, the more pixels and enhancements you can throw at it before you’ll see slowdown. Which GPU do I need? ¶Ĭhoosing a GPU for Dolphin is a fairly simple task.

Meanwhile, others struggle to run full speed at all times on even the most powerful of processors. Some games only use features that are easy to emulate, and thus will run full-speed on just about any computer that supports Dolphin.

But, in the end, it does what the game instructs it to do. It's important to remember that Dolphin is a console emulator with tons of optimizations and features. Note: For more information regarding CPU performance, please check out this handy benchmark that contains results from tons of users. As such, we can only recommend Ryzen or newer for Dolphin among AMD's line of processors.įor more details, such as specific CPU recommendations, CPU comparisons, or what hardware you should purchase to get playable speeds on a specific game, please ask on our Hardware Forum before purchasing. Be wary of U and Y series processors, as their reduced clockspeeds often struggle with Dolphin's workload.ĪMD: Dolphin's workload didn't match the strengths of AMD processors until the Ryzen line. Newer generations will give higher performance per clock, and K series processors will allow for overclocking to gain extra performance. Intel: Within a single generation of processors, the difference between i5 and i7 (hyperthreading/extra core counts) don't affect Dolphin very much. Newer processors are generally better than older ones, thanks to the increased IPC that comes with newer architectures. With four cores, Dolphin has two cores for the main emulation threads, a third core for other tasks, and another core for the operating system and background tasks to run without taking resources from the emulator. Additional cores will not make Dolphin go any faster, though an 'extra' core that Dolphin isn’t using may help slightly by keeping background tasks from using the same cores as Dolphin.Īccordingly, the perfect CPU for Dolphin has high IPC, a high clock rate, and four cores or more. Dolphin is a dual core application that relies upon IPC (Instructions Per Clock) and clockspeed for performance.

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