Anytime someone asks about frameskipping in Dolphin, I just refer them to skid's post:
(03-23-2012, 03:20 PM)skid Wrote: Frame skipping cannot really be done on modern consoles (modern as in any console that uses 3D polygons instead of sprites like the NES, SNES, Megadrive/Genesis). The reason is that the CPU communicates to the GPU using a "ring-buffer". In Dolphin we call that the FIFO. The PCSX2 team also have blogs written up on the ring-buffer used in the PS2.
Unlike old consoles which use an interrupt to signal that a frame is finishing, 3D consoles continuously send a stream of 3D commands to the screen (hence the reason why it's called a ring) with no start or end points.
Without start or end points, Dolphin cannot skip frames because it does not know when the frame starts or ends - quite different from a NES emulator.