How can I determine if I'm CPU or GPU bound?

[eli2k]

I'm trying to run Wii Sports with one of the SVN 3xxx builds, but FPS is somewhat low (40) and it makes the entire game run slow. I've disabled most of the post-processing (anisotropic filtering and AA), and it's only running at 640x480, on E8400 and HD4850. Can I determine what's making it go slow? It's mostly fine on the menu screens, just not in game. Does the audio make most games slow down?

- Eli

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[omegadox]

No way really except profiling the code. Dolphin needs more counters on the vertex loaders, CPU recompiling, etc. You only know if CPU hertz is high and FPS is low, there is a fun bottleneck in the video emulation :P.

[eli2k]

So that means there is no way to tell if I would be able to get more fps if I increase CPU or GPU speed, except trial and error? I'm asking to see if it's worth messing around to overclock my CPU.

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[omegadox]

Originally Posted by eli2k

So that means there is no way to tell if I would be able to get more fps if I increase CPU or GPU speed, except trial and error? I'm asking to see if it's worth messing around to overclock my CPU.

Dolphin depends strongly on CPU speed. CPU speed increase will help. The speed of your GPU barley affects the performance of Dolphin.

[Gareth1977]

Dolphin is more reliant on gpus than people realise. I tested with my gtx 260 against my geforce 8300. Guess which one was faster. By 2X at least

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[Matis]

You must be joking.
The 8300 is an on board video card(as far as I know, at least). For one, that means that the GPU and the CPU will fight for the system's RAM, if there is not enough. Then there's the fact that normal RAM is FAR slower than the one used in GPUs.

To top that off, the 8300 is probably 70-100 times slower than the GTX 260. And all you get is a 2x speed or so.

(sure, the difference in clock speed is not really HUGE, but the way the GTX 260 handles operations is really far better and faster)

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[Gareth1977]

Its not integrated graphics, It has its own dedicated memory. Its no match for a gtx 260 I know but it runs games pretty good, even games my previous gfx card (7950gt) couldnt. And in retrospect the gtx 260 was probably more like 4x faster (I tested this about a month ago)

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[omegadox]

Of course it will be slower if the GPU is really crappy. I still get 12 FPS in Zelda TP on my 8600M GS or 9600 GT. A faster chip can save on shading time, still most of Dolphin runs via CPU. Only CG shading is performed on the GPU.

[jasong]

I've got my 4850 under rma right now....stuck with a 7900gt till they get it back to me. But funnily enough it runs faster with the gt than the 4850. I think the ATI implementation is still a bit flawed.

[PCXL-Fan]

I don't know if this is the case with the dolphin, but a known problem with ati cards in the pcsx2 scene for this generation of cards and one or 2 cards of the 3000 generation is that they seem to offload some of the burden onto the already overburdened cpu. To compound the likelyhood of this is that many people with quadcores seem to not experience this problem with their 4000 series cards. So the idle 3rd and 4th core seem to be able to take that extra processing that is dumped onto the cpu.

Runawayprisoner did some snapshots of his cpu usage in taskmanager many months ago while running a core2quad and a 4850, and it did show minor usage or his 3rd and 4th processor when he was using pcsx2.

In pcsx2 many people who upgraded from a card like yours (7900gt) to a 4870 or 4850 have seen a decrease in performance.

With regular pc games you obviously wouldn't see a problem like this since cpu's usually aren't stressed to the max. The gpu is, but usually not the cpu. May also have something to do with the curent state of the drivers.

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[boogerlad]

Not to hijack this thread, but why when emulated, i get more than 729mhz/729mhz on the emulator, but my speed is only like 20 fps. Idle skipping on or off doesn't make a difference.

[omegadox]

The CPU is running at good, but the bottlenecks in the graphics emulation causes huge slow downs in the FPS. It executes the code at the proper speed, but then has to wait for the graphics to finish its work.

[boogerlad]

hmm, so is it a latency issue? Would overclocking my gpu/ the pci-e bus help? I've got a hd4850, and a e1200 clocked at 3.2ghz. Not the best overclocking, but good eneough to get dolphin at more than 729/729mhz.

[tuanming]

Here's the final verdict... You need both good cpu and gpu. How to determine if you're cpu or gpu bound, you say? Well, you'll need to do a comparison between the newer and the older gpu or cpu and the only way to do that is by switching out the old with the new and bench test it. But the most part, a good overclock can usually give some good fps especially with core2duos

You can just simply tell by experiences if you've using computer and keep up to date with it. But for the most part, the HD 4850 is pretty darn good so you probably won't need to worry much about the gpu unless you plan to play at a really really high resolution.

Or compare other people game fps with better hardware and same dolphine configurations...

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[eli2k]

Originally Posted by omegadox

The CPU is running at good, but the bottlenecks in the graphics emulation causes huge slow downs in the FPS. It executes the code at the proper speed, but then has to wait for the graphics to finish its work.

Hey omegadox - can you clarify what you mean by a bottleneck in graphics emulation? I take this to mean the actual executing code itself that is emulating the graphics portion is causing slowdown, not a GPU-thing, but technically CPU-limited.

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