(04-23-2019, 12:16 AM)illuminerdi Wrote: plus the fact that the original disc read speeds of the GCN are well short of the read speed of a 6gb/s SATA drive, so an emulated disc read shouldn't be the cause of a stutter?
Yes, that reasoning is correct. (Unless you've enabled the Speed up Disc Transfer Rate setting in the game-specific settings, in which case Dolphin will try to emulate an impossibly fast disc drive and your hard drive can have trouble keeping up.)