all of the hacks in the 'Other' section of the hacks tab are turned off per-pixel lighting is turned off (this option significantly increases how demanding dolphin is on your video card) you're using windows (video card requirements may be different on mac osx or linux distributions but the variance shouldn't be very significant) Having a more powerful video card will allow you to raise your graphics settings higher without reducing performance.

So keep in mind that the video card requirements are not the same for every game, what you see below is merely the the average for most of the more demanding games. Later on in this thread I will discuss how to identify whether your cpu is bottlenecking your video card or not.īecause of these simple facts the only way that I can provide you with some idea as to what video card you should have is to assume that your cpu is not bottlenecking your video card and provide you with an AVERAGE video card requirement for more demanding games for each combination of settings. Buying a better video card won't help you if the cpu is bottlenecking your current video card. If your cpu is bottlenecking your video card you must either adjust your settings or buy a better cpu. That is, if your cpu is too slow it will bottleneck the video card, and vice versa. You must also take into account cpu bottlenecks. The first thing you need to understand about the video card requirements of dolphin is that it varies a lot from one game to another, one operating system to another, one backend to another, and from one configuration of settings to another. Each is an entirely different set of functions (code) that emulates the GC/Wii GPU.ĪPU: A term used by AMD for a cpu that contains gpu hardware within the cpu die (one chip that acts as both the cpu and gpu). Dolphin has a openGL, d3d9, and d3d11 backend. Video Backend: A set of functions that use a particular API to emulate the behavior of the GPU on the GC/Wii. Video memory: Very fast memory on a video card that the gpu can directly access. Many laptops and modern desktops purchased from brand name companies have these and they are extremely inadequate for the kind of shader processing that dolphin requires. These are usually integrated into the motherboard, cpu package, or cpu die of a PC instead of being on a separate circuit board (a video card). Integrated GPU: A GPU that does not have its own dedicated video ram, instead it reserves a section of main memory to act as its video ram. GPU: Graphics processing unit, the microprocessor on your video card that processes all of the openGL, d3d9, or d3d11 shader code Video card: An expansion card for a PC that contains a GPU, dedicated video memory, and various other parts.

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