upgrade cpu for gamecube emulation

willywillywily0 · January 6, 2018

I built my pc a few years ago and have recently been wanting to get into gamecube emulation. Currently my pc can't run dolphin emulated gamecube games at a solid framerate which I assume is because my cpu isn''t good enough.

What I want to do is pretty much just upgrade my cpu enough so that it can run dolphin and also not have a negative impact on other tasks.

My current specs are

CPU: AMD FX-6300

RAM: 8GB

GPU: Nvidia GTX 960

This pc is used primarily for web browsing, coding, and gaming

LienusLateTips · January 6, 2018

Intel i5 3470/4460 + Motherboard

Damascus · January 6, 2018

I would go for ryzen

Streetguru · January 6, 2018

14 minutes ago, willywillywily0 said:

You can't run games on the lowest settings? Is like multi-core stuff enabled on the latest version of dolphin?

I could emulate smash bros/double dash with just a 4 core APU system.

Zodiark1593 · January 6, 2018

33 minutes ago, JDE said:

Intel i5 3470/4460 + Motherboard

For emulation, Haswell actually represents a pretty substantial (20%+ per clock) performance increase over Ivy Bridge.

From what the Dolphin and PCSX2 forums suggest, Ryzen is also serviceable for emulation, though gets completely flattened here by very high clocked Intel CPUs. Still, for a general purpose build, eating the hit to emulation and going for a Ryzen chip would probably be the way to go. Most emulated games should run without overly detrimental frame drops on a Ryzen chip, with only some outliers (Shadow of the Colossus) out of reach for all but Intel's highest clocked skus.