What are the system requirements for the dolphin emulator?

Answer 1

As far as the system requirements to run the emulator, I'm afraid that the requirements stated by the developer may be a little low to allow any real satisfaction from its use. These would be the MINIMUM requirements and are as follows:

• GFX: Radeon 9500+ series card recommended, but Geforce FX series also work. Expect severe graphics problems with lower cards.
• CPU: The fastest you can find.
• RAM: 256MB or higher strongly recommended.
• Audio: Any Windows/DirectX-compatible soundcard

But as a mode of real comparison, I can offer my personal experience running games on dolphin from a couple different pcs:

I have one PC that meets these requirements (geforce 9800gt 1024mb, Intel dual-core 2.7ghz, 2048 mb ram). this PC can run most any modern game (black ops, crysis, etc) on decent enough settings with no problems. However, for example, when trying to play the gamecube version of twilight princess on dolphin, I only get about 3fps with desirable settings. Dolphin does allow for a lot of tweaks in the settings and after playing around with different combinations, I have been able to achieve around 25fps, but at these settings, too many graphical glitches and artifacts appear making the game realistically unplayable.

I have another PC that well exceeds these requirements (geforce 425gt 1024mb, Intel corei7 quad 1.8ghz, 4096mb ram). On this computer, games are playable on dolphin, but only just playable. On the best settings, I can push around 30fps on avg, but there are still some minor graphical glitches that are kindof annoying. From my experience, this is going to be your bottom line as far as what kind of system it would take to run a gamecube game on dolphin and get ANY semblance of the actual gamecube experience.

In reality, you will need an unrealistically good system to be able to play dolphin. As such, i wouldn't expect it to find its way into most peoples library of emulators for at least a couple of years.