Dolphin suddenly slow with all games

[dolphbaby22]

Help! I used to run Dolphin 5 at a perfect 60 fps for all my games up until a month ago. So I took a break from the emulator and when I got back today its running insanely slow for seemingly no reason. I tested No More Heroes and Mario Galaxy and both games vary between 15-35 fps depending on onscreen activity. Both of these games used to run at silky smooth 60 fps on my pc:


Specs - Core i7-2600 at 3.4 Ghz, AMD Radeon r9 280x 3gb, 8gb Ram, Windows 10 x64

So when I opened Task Manager it seems Dolphin isn't using more than 10-15 percent of my CPU no matter what. Shouldn't it be higher? GPU usage is about 40 percent. Also, I've just now discovered that the internal resolution and anti aliasing settings has no effect on the games. It always runs at native resolution no matter what I set, from what I can see. I don't know if this is related.

Things I've tried:

Enabling/disabling dual core setting.
Rebooting PC.
Reinstalling dolphin.
Enabling Disabling various speed hacks.
Changing power settings to high performance mode.
Testing other PC games(all run smoothly).
Running dolphin in adminstrator mode.
changing backends. Similar performance across open gl and directx.

So now I'm at a complete loss. Please help me!

[ExtremeDude2]

Do you have the same problems with the latest dev versions as well?

[dolphbaby22]

(10-07-2018, 05:22 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: Do you have the same problems with the latest dev versions as well?

Yes. Not only those but older builds starting from 3 are also the same.

[DJBarry004]

Make sure your PC is not overheating.

[dolphbaby22]

(10-07-2018, 06:40 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: Make sure your PC is not overheating.

Other pc games run fine for hours. Also cpu is driven to full 3.4 GHz when I open dolphin. Its just the usage that stays at 10 percent. Can it still be heating? Also why are the internal resolution and aa settings not working?

[DJBarry004]

Because your GPU is not the actual problem, it´s the CPU that is your bottleneck.

BTW, if you enable Skip EFB Access from CPU, does SMG goes back at normal speed?

One more thing to note is that Dolphin´s requirements are actually a lot different than any PC game.

[dolphbaby22]

(10-07-2018, 07:41 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: Because your GPU is not the actual problem, it´s the CPU that is your bottleneck.

BTW, if you enable Skip EFB Access from CPU, does SMG goes back at normal speed?

One more thing to note is that Dolphin´s requirements are actually a lot different than any PC game.

Skip EFB access does nothing. None of the options seem to make a difference. Also why do you think the resolution and aa aren't working?

[DJBarry004]

Again, your GPU manages AA and IR. Since that is not affecting performance in any way, your GPU is out of the question. Your processor is the bottleneck.

I´d say you should delete all of your settings (Documents/Dolphin Emulator). Sure enough, make a backup of all your saves copying them somewhere else.

Alternatively, create a blank portable.txt file right where Dolphin is and try again. Dolphin will ignore everything that is saved in My Documents and will do as if you opened it for the very first time.

[dolphbaby22]

(10-07-2018, 08:02 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: Again, your GPU manages AA and IR. Since that is not affecting performance in any way, your GPU is out of the question. Your processor is the bottleneck.

I´d say you should delete all of your settings (Documents/Dolphin Emulator). Sure enough, make a backup of all your saves copying them somewhere else.

Alternatively, create a blank portable.txt file right where Dolphin is and try again. Dolphin will ignore everything that is saved in My Documents and will do as if you opened it for the very first time.

Creating a blank portable.txt didn't help either. It just rest every setting. Also I just noticed that enabling skip EFB access gives the message 'EFBaccessenable overridden by game ini' when I boot the game. 

I tested my CPU by opening up a 4k video file and it's getting upto a 100 percent usage no problem. I don't think it's getting throttled in any way. Every other program is able to use the cpu fully. Do you think dolphin using only 10 percent has anything to do with its settings?

[Kurausukun]

Dolphin only uses two cores, so "throttling" doesn't mean your CPU is at 100%, unless you only have two cores. Also, that message just means that EFB access is needed for that particular game, so it's been enabled for you from the game's .ini file.