I’m looking into turning a Intel NUC into a dedicated Lakka/RetroArch machine but haven’t decided yet on the type of hardware I’d need.
It should be able to run Nintendo Wii, GameCube and Sega Saturn at full speed with an internal resolution of 720p or preferably 1080p.
Would a 7th gen i5-7260U processor and the integrated GPU Iris Plus Graphics 640 be powerful enough?
It may not have the grunt for Gamecube/Wii, but it’s probably not a good idea to base purchasing decisions on libretro-dolphin, which still isn’t in great shape.
The Sega Saturn cores available in RetroArch don’t support resolution increases, but they’re very demanding anyway. I think that CPU should be enough but I can’t say for sure.
I have a similar laptop system with an Intel i5 6200u dual core and HD 520 Intel GPU. It slows down more than my Shield TV does with the standalone Dolphin emulator running Zelda Wind Waker at 720p. It’s much worse with heavier games like Resident Evil 4 and Zelda TP. Unfortunately, the Intel Vulkan drivers for the GPU are pretty bad by comparison so you’re stuck with Dx11. Maybe they have better drivers for the Iris GPU, but this means most Wii games are out of the question.
The beetle Saturn emulator in Retroarch does run many 2d games at fulls speed, but slows down on many 3d games. I’d expect your system to get roughly 30% more performance over my system in general.
@TOMillr I have the NUC i7-7567U with the Iris Plus 650, and its able to handle PCSX2 at (at least) 2x internal resolution, playing demanding games like God of War (at least for the short time I tested them) at a solid and smooth 60 FPS.
I have found that for most of the demanding emulators, as a general rule, 2x internal resolution is the best trade off between looks and performance. Its a dramatic difference from the 1x internal resolution, but not so much that the hardware has to struggle.
The single most important rating when running emulators is your Single Thread Rating (STR). You can view your CPU’s STR here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
To put some numbers to the CPU/GPU’s already in this topic:
@fivefeet8’s CPU has a STR of 1499 with a graphics chip a rating of 833.
The NUC i5-7260U has a STR of 1963 with a graphics chip rating of 1392
The NUC i7-7567U has a STR of 2270 with a graphics chip rating of 1488
How well does your system run Dolphin GC/Wii games? Such as Zelda TP and RE4? 720p/1080p? Are the Vulkan drivers on Iris GPU’s capable of running Dolphin/PPSSPP Vulkan render backends?
Thank you.
5
I ran around in Zelda TP (on the Wii) for about 15 minutes testing it out for you.
It ran at 30 FPS (100% Speed) at both 2x Native (720p) and 3x Native (1080p) resolutions. When I uncapped the frame rate (Dolphin lets you set the cap up to 200%) then I got a fairly stable 47 at 2x Native (720p) and 34 at 3x Native (1080p).
This was just running and rolling around in the early area. Depending on how demanding combat scenes are, you might be better off at 2x Native (720p) to make sure it does not dip below 29-30 FPS.
This was all with the OpenGL Renderer (There is no Vulcan option on this build for some reason) on Ubuntu 17.10 with a standalone Dolphin. Most of the settings are default except for “Enable Dual Core” (which I checked).
The sweet spot for this box seems to be 2x Native resolution on the more demanding emulators.
Update:
I played a little Mario Kart with 2x Native and other than a few frame dips when the camera was panning around the start of the race before the count down (I am assuming it was still loading some data from the HDD) I got a pretty stable 57-60 FPS (100% speed) and it felt very smooth. The actual Wii hardware doesn’t always maintain a solid 30 or 60 FPS, so I am not too worried about some minor fluctuation. For what it is, this little box (to be clear its the i7 not the i5) is worth it.
I did try the development build that has Vulkan in it but it failed to create a Vulkan context. I am not sure if that was because Vulkan is still experimental in Dolphin, or if they are using something that Vulkan 1.0 does not support.
Thanks for the information.
Vulkan in the Dolphin builds runs fine with my Shield TV and an Asus laptop I have with an i7/Nvidia 960 GPU. It’s much faster in many games on Wii/GC with dolphin. The performance difference is much more noticeable on my Shield TV because of the older ARM CPU.
Maybe Intel Iris GPU drivers still have issues with Vulkan. I haven’t been able to get Vulkan working in Dolphin or PPSSPP with my Intel HD 520 GPU even though I can select Vulkan as the render backend on both.
Looking at various forum posts related to Vulkan and Linux (for example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/807857/how-to-install-intel-graphics-driver-for-using-vulkan-on-ubuntu-16-04), it seems that there is some additional setup required to get it operational. The Iris 650 is fully compatible with Vulkan 1.0, so there should be no issues here once the OS has the correct software installed. I will try and do this sometime this week and see if I can get it working.
Edit:
I was able to get Vulkan installed on Ubuntu 17.10 (just install mesa-vulkan-drivers), however performance in Dolphin (with Zelda TP as a test game) is all over the place, but its mostly just terrible. The average frame rate is far far below that of the OpenGL renderer (sometimes as low as 10-15 FPS on 2x Native), and just moving the cursor around drops the frame rate to less than 25 FPS.
I don’t know if this is an artifact of it still being experimental in Dolphin (its not available on the most recent stable build), or of the Linux support (it doesn’t come setup out of the box for a reason), or if the drivers for this chip are just not up to par (which would be odd, because the OpenGL renderer works perfectly)