FIXED: Massive change in performance

[Slashlore]

Fixed: Double checked to make sure there were no other programs running and gave laptop a thorough cleaning. Lots of dust found on fans and in vents. Everything runs fine now

I was able to run games smoothly for a few hours at ~60 fps, but then I tried running Sonic Adventure 2 and it maxed out at 15 FPS. The audio was awful and the game was stuttering so bad it was unplayable. So naturally I went back to playing the other games and the same thing happened. 15 FPS, terrible stuttering, and awful audio. No game is playable anymore.

Games that ran fine at 60 FPS:
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
PSO Episode I & II
Gauntlet Dark Legacy

Things I have tried to fix:
Running Dolphin Emulator as administrator
Restarting my laptop
Uninstalling/Reinstalling
Deleting the Dolphin Emulator folder in the Documents folder
Following every guide I could find to optimize graphic and audio settings
Running all the games as single and dual core
Ran latest dev build (5.0-9602)
Ran all stable builds (4.0 and higher)
Messed with CPU clock override settings all the way from 6% to 400%

OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home x64
CPU: Intel Core i5-4200H @ 2.80GHz
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4600
RAM: DDR3 Dual 8GB

[KHg8m3r]

Couple other things you could check:
-Do you unplug your charger cord?
-Did you check your Windows Power options to make sure that you were running in high performance mode?
-Did you actually use the restart command, and not shut down? (to get around any Fast Boot issues)
-Did your computer overheat and throttle your speed? Have you tried playing since then?
-Check your clock speeds and CPU/GPU temperature with a program like hwmonitor (do a Google search, should be the first result) to make sure you aren't over heating or having your CPU/GPU downclock?

[Slashlore]

Couple other things you could check:
-Do you unplug your charger cord?
-Did you check your Windows Power options to make sure that you were running in high performance mode?
-Did you actually use the restart command, and not shut down? (to get around any Fast Boot issues)
-Did your computer overheat and throttle your speed? Have you tried playing since then?
-Check your clock speeds and CPU/GPU temperature with a program like hwmonitor (do a Google search, should be the first result) to make sure you aren't over heating or having your CPU/GPU downclock?

• The charger is always plugged in during use
  
• It is set to high performance mode
  
• I have both restarted and shutdown.
  
• I have tried playing again since the issues began but it was after using the laptop for a few hours.
  
• Just installed hwmonitor and attaching image of the game loading up. It was even slower than before.
  
• I don't know much about clock speeds or the proper temperature range
     

[JonnyH]

62 degrees should be fine - unless your laptop vendor used /extremely/ conservative settings. 100% gpu utilisation looks a little weird though. Do you have the latest Intel drivers? Remember that windows update likes to change stuff like that behind your back without telling you.

Also double check your IR isn't high, and you don't have "synchronous ubershaders" enabled - an integrated haswell-era laptop-tdp GPU will likely struggle on higher IRs.

Also make sure nothing else is using the gpu - I think task manager now shows some (limited) GPU stats.

[Slashlore]

62 degrees should be fine - unless your laptop vendor used /extremely/ conservative settings. 100% gpu utilisation looks a little weird though. Do you have the latest Intel drivers? Remember that windows update likes to change stuff like that behind your back without telling you.

Also double check your IR isn't high, and you don't have "synchronous ubershaders" enabled - an integrated haswell-era laptop-tdp GPU will likely struggle on higher IRs.

Also make sure nothing else is using the gpu - I think task manager now shows some (limited) GPU stats.

I believe I have the latest drivers. I have a Dell support program that automatically updates them.
IR is native
The setting is on the default synchronous
There are a few programs running in the background like steam, discord, and such. I'll try again with them off.

[Slashlore]

I believe I have the latest drivers. I have a Dell support program that automatically updates them.
IR is native
The setting is on the default synchronous
There are a few programs running in the background like steam, discord, and such. I'll try again with them off.

It works! Decided to give it a clean , boot it up, close all background programs, and now it runs smoothly.
Thanks so much for the help! I have been looking forward to playing games from my childhood