could my pc run dolphin?

[scott2scott]

hi guys im new and i would like to find out if my pc could run dolphin at all? - cheers


heres my specs :

OS : Windows 7 home premium (64bit)
Processor: AMD A6-6400K APU with Radeon(tm) HD 8470D Graphics(2 CPUs),3.9GHz
RAM: 8.0GBS

[Zorlon]

Yes it should run a lot of games just fine, use there compat list though and notes taken to tweak each game

[scott2scott]

thanks mate much appreciated

[Ramja_Jet]

Also bro, you want to use an old build to get the fastest speeds, I use the astonishingly fast (in comparison to the newer builds) Dolphin-win-x64-r6515. Check it out, it seems to be the one to go to.

[xerxespersrex]

nah man, bad advice. you want the latest build. they're faster than the older builds by a ton (as of the last three months) and much more accurate. only use old builds if your pc absolutely cant run the games you want full speed, because older versions have desynch HLE audio which means sound will be full speed even during slowdowns. otherwise latest is always the better choice now.

[MaslowK]

nah man, bad advice. you want the latest build. they're faster than the older builds by a ton (as of the last three months) and much more accurate.

The majority of the time this is true, yes. However there are still quite a few games that work best on particular builds, which aren't necessarily the newest.

[xerxespersrex]

the TC wanted to know generally if his hardware could run dolphin and in that case the best answer would be one that gives him the best performance. the older versions of dolphin are really only better performance for ancient gpus, using the crappy d3d9 backend which doesnt exist anymore. in the last couple months specifically the dev builds of dolphin have been getting tons of cpu optimizations, there was even one today which gives a ~4% increase in speed to the cpu emulator. if we were back in dolphin's 3.0 era where performance was being sacrificed for accuracy it might still be better to use the old hackish builds, but since build 4.0-3000 or so the devs have found a nice balance between the two and personally i've had a better experience around the board using latest.

[Cosmic]

You're actually both right. I'm running an overlocked i5 3570k with a GTX 680 in my main PC and the speed boost in recent versions has been massive, particularly with the Direct 3D renderer. On the other hand, if you're running more modest hardware you may well find the older versions give you better results. I tried some of the more recent builds on my Macbook Air a while ago and found the earliest Mac builds from about 3-4 years ago were a lot faster. Metroid Prime is one of the more demanding games on Dolphin and with those older versions it was hovering around 25-30fps. Not perfect, but very playable and honestly pretty impressive for a laptop with integrated graphics, let alone one that isn't exactly made for games to begin with.

So yeah, try the most recent builds but also make sure you grab a couple of the older ones for good measure. There actually used to be a sticky thread on the Dolphin forums with recommended versions for different hardware configurations. It should still be there, but it it's not, you might want to post on there with your specs and see what versions people suggest for you.

[Ramja_Jet]

I have integrated HD graphics card and the new builds run like crap (10 fps at 2x resolution on a good day??? That's ridiculous!). Old builds or even the stable 4.0 (I recently found out) run at a constant 25 (which is max for pal) at 2x and even 3x internal resolution - depending on situation. CRAP on your new builds, I do. Crap.

[Inferno.]

I have integrated HD graphics card and the new builds run like crap (10 fps at 2x resolution on a good day??? That's ridiculous!). Old builds or even the stable 4.0 (I recently found out) run at a constant 25 (which is max for pal) at 2x and even 3x internal resolution - depending on situation. CRAP on your new builds, I do. Crap.

Well I crap on your integrated GPU. Get a proper video card