Homebrew Wii Emulation on PC?

[tueidj]

A dual core what? P4?

 

[Rydian]

tueidj, emulation of game systems is CPU-dependant. The GPU is only needed to be good enough to render the scene as is, because the emulator passes the graphical data to it via DX/GL calls so there's no emulation being done by the GPU.

 

[tueidj]

*facepalm*

No emulation being done by the GPU? Do you think wii games use DirectX/OpenGL?

 

[Rydian]

*facepalm*

No emulation being done by the GPU? Do you think wii games use DirectX/OpenGL?

When run in an emulator, yes. The emulator sends the graphical data to the GPU via DX/GL, and the GPU interprets it like any other game. This is what allows things like running N64 games at different aspect ratios, and running Wii games at a higher resolution than the system itself can do... because it's the GPU doing the rendering after it's been passed the setup/scene data.

The actual emulation is done by the CPU.

 

[tueidj]

GX is a bare metal instruction set for the wii's ATI GPU. Emulating those same instructions via DirectX/OpenGL is about 10 times slower, especially when transferring textures because the main memory and GPU are no longer tied together like they are on real hardware. And those emulated ops are executed by the graphics card. The same graphics card that is also doing a bunch of other stuff for your OS that the wii's GPU never had to, like compositing and rendering the desktop. As I already said, if there's no graphics being drawn a basic Core2 PC (E6600 for example) will run dolphin faster than a real wii system runs - I know this for a fact and if you try to play Desert Bus you'll see evidence of it.

Just because it looks like your CPU utilization is at 100% while dolphin is running, doesn't mean it's being used to emulate the powepc; dolphin likes to use spinlocks as synchronization primitives so threads end up sitting in while loops instead of being suspended.

 

[Rydian]

I was responding to the idea that the GPU is responsible for emulation and the CPU didn't matter as much.

 

[Hielkenator]

All factors count for good emulation.

 

[how_do_i_do_that]

AA and AF is done through the video card. If everything was done through the CPU, there wouldn't even be a need to select the graphics engine.

I also said some not all, read it again.