When it comes to emulating consoles, you usually find two or three parallel projects that in their own way seek to reproduce the system with the greatest possible accuracy, but if we're talking about the Nintendo Wii or the GameCube, there's a single path, and at the end of it we find Dolphin. Yesterday, its developers announced version 5.0, which is shaping up to be the fastest, most efficient and most accurate yet.
The first time I downloaded Dolphin I was surprised by how well it worked on my hardware, even though I don't have anything special sitting on my desk, and most importantly, I didn't use a gamepad. Of course, I entered the world of Dolphin in version 4.0, and its sharpest edges had already been smoothed out, especially when we consider the most popular titles (in my personal case, all the Mario Kart games). But Dolphin wasn't perfect, and to be honest, it still isn't. Does perfect emulation even exist? More than once, Dolphin's developers and its users have been forced to implement certain hacks to make one game or another work, while at the bottom of the list there are always a couple of titans that refuse to work no matter what settings. The good news is that Dolphin has just entered a new stage, and if you've never downloaded it, you might want to give it a try now.
According to the official page, the latest editions of Dolphin (in essence, all builds between 3.0 and 4.0) focused on achieving greater accuracy, sacrificing performance and forcing the use of some of the aforementioned hacks to compensate. In version 5.0 we find what can be described as a general code cleanup, with multiple optimizations in OpenGL and D3D11, the addition of a new backend D3D12, zFreeze support (which enables the execution of games like Rogue Squadron II), fixes in texture rendering, and according to statistics, a CPU emulation 100 percent faster.
The list continues with audio improvements, greater Netplay support, ES_Launch (something that caused headaches in titles like Metroid Prime Trilogy and House of the Dead 2), an exclusive fullscreen mode (lower latency), and much more. Of course, all these benefits have a price, but it's not necessarily monetary. Dolphin 5.0 abandons Windows XP and Windows Vista, support for 64 bits in the processor and operating system is mandatory, and the minimum video compatibility is D3D10 or OpenGL 3, meaning we need at least an AMD Radeon HD 4000 series, an Nvidia GeForce 8000 series, or an Intel HD 2000 video. If your computer doesn't meet these new requirements, the most recommended thing is to download the previous version.
