Audio stutter/frames dropping - wasn't before [solved]

[wKey]

Hey all.

I've been using Dolphin 5.0 to play through some Fire Emblem, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. PoR was played through to completion and successfully transferred on into RD. I've played through up until the end of Part 2/start of Part 3 ish? With no problems. Everything was A-OK, fantastic, not so much as a blip. The start of the next chapter was playing fine, too, but I called it quits--

Up until I went to play again a month later, and it was... Not really playable in the slightest. Frames/VPS start off fine in the game intro (where they're warning about the wiimote stuff), but as soon as sound is introduced it all drops like a stone. Everything stutters and slows to a crawl.

Upon testing, I've found that this happens with both PoR and RD. I've also tested them on Dolphin 4.0.2 and the same effect occurs.
I don't remember messing with any settings and, as far as I can tell, my updates should be current. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling dolphin, too. I've glanced at the first 5 and last 5 pages of the RD thread in these forums but didn't find much luck.

I'm hesitant to mess with settings given it was all working Just Fine beforehand -- I'm mostly wondering if anyone knows of similar occurrences happening of late, or if there's anything that could have inadvertently changed? My apologies, tech isn't my forte so I'm just... puzzled as to why it was working perfectly fine and now it's anything but;; Thank you for your time and patience.

*Specs: Gigabyte laptop
Operating System: Windows 7 x64
Processor/CPU: Intel Core i7-4710HQ @ 250GHz
Video Card/GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 860M
Memory/RAM: 8GB

[JMC47]

It sounds like your laptop isn't kicking into high power mode. The intro of fire emblem is super lightweight so of course your laptop doesn't need to break a sweat with it. But as soon as the game is doing stuff, your CPU/GPU not being clocked up makes a difference and it lags.

Maybe switch your laptop's power plan to prefer maximum performance?

[wKey]

(07-07-2018, 04:17 PM)JMC47 Wrote: It sounds like your laptop isn't kicking into high power mode.  The intro of fire emblem is super lightweight so of course your laptop doesn't need to  break a sweat with it.  But as soon as the game is doing stuff, your CPU/GPU not being clocked up makes a difference and it lags.

Maybe switch your laptop's power plan to prefer maximum performance?

Yeah. It was the power plan, which I don't know when  or why it changed but I must have changed it, at some point, for one reason or another. Changing it from power saver back to balanced fixed it right up, and I feel a damn fool for wasting your time (and giving myself a few headaches) over it s:

Nonetheless, thank you ever so much! Now I can get back onto pretending at tactics : D Cheers~

[JMC47]

It's nice to have a thread where someone is having a problem and being able to solve it pretty easily, so, cheers! Have fun!