Galaxy S9+ with latest Dolphin

[Twiggy4K]

So I am farely new to the android dolphin scene since my phones haven't been the best to run the emulator and I need some assistance.
The S9+ is extremely powerful but I don't know how that fairs with the emulator cause some games run at minimum performance. I have read around here that it has something to do with Samsung's OpenGL drivers to other things but I have no idea nor do I desire to delve into it. I am just your average user looking to play some classic games on my phone.

Should I just contantly update my application until someone manages to get them running well on higher end phones or is there a previous build that might run these games smoother?

[LG Fanatic]

Is your S9 the Exynos or Snapdragon version? I ask because, the Exynos GPU is missing a key graphical feature that dolphin needs for speedy emulation. Plus the Mali GPU in the Exynos tends to have bugs that further hamper dolphin's performance. If not, your best bet is to utilize the "emulated cpu over/underclock option". Increasing or lowering(usually lower is the way to go) the value can increase emulation speed and allow some games to run at or near full speed. The one issue with this speed hack is it may introduce game breaking bugs.

[mstreurman]

So I am farely new to the android dolphin scene since my phones haven't been the best to run the emulator and I need some assistance.
The S9+ is extremely powerful but I don't know how that fairs with the emulator cause some games run at minimum performance. I have read around here that it has something to do with Samsung's OpenGL drivers to other things but I have no idea nor do I desire to delve into it. I am just your average user looking to play some classic games on my phone.

Should I just contantly update my application until someone manages to get them running well on higher end phones or is there a previous build that might run these games smoother?

Your best bet is to always have your Android version up to date, you can do this by going to your Android settings > About my phone (usually), this way you can make sure that you at least have the latest drivers for your device. Secondly although recommended to always use the most recent version of Dolphin, updating once a month should be more than enough, unless there is some very specific issue fixed in a more recent build. (Tales of Phantasia springs to mind)

If you are still experiencing issues with your game in Dolphin, there are plenty of guides on youtube to find on how to configure Dolphin to run games smoothly on an Android device. Sadly enough all of them will need you to enable potentially game breaking options like underclocking your Emulated CPU or Turning off EFB/XFB and even go as far as having you edit .ini-files of specific games to turn off much needed options.

If you are willing to do all this, then you can get a relatively smooth experience on high-end smartphones nowadays as long as they have a Snapdragon 800 series SoC, any other SoC usually is missing too many features in their drivers for them to either run smooth or get anything to show on the screen at all.

[Guilherme]

The bad about Samsung is its DVFS, the Galaxy phones lose more performance over the intensive usage time than other devices with same specs. Recently Sasmsung Galaxy S7 and S8 have updated to Oreo, and Exynos version received the new r22p0 driver, which brings support to an important extension needed for Dolphin, but we don't know about actual emulator's performance yet. Snapdragon 845 version of S9 should perform better as it has nice GPU drivers, but thermal throttling is still a problem.

[Twiggy4K]

Is your S9 the Exynos or Snapdragon version?  I ask because, the Exynos GPU is missing a key graphical feature that dolphin needs for speedy emulation.  Plus the Mali GPU in the Exynos tends to have bugs that further hamper dolphin's performance.  If not, your best bet is to utilize the "emulated cpu over/underclock option".  Increasing or lowering(usually lower is the way to go) the value can increase emulation speed and allow some games to run at or near full speed.  The one issue with this speed hack is it may introduce game breaking bugs.

I have the Snapdragon version of the S9+. I have also messed around with the Emulate CPU clock speeds and it said that if you have a more powerful device you can turn up the percentage more but this causes lag. So I would emulate lower than the 100% until I find a suitable and stable FPS? Since I'm trying to learn what most of the these interal features do, I want to know which would be the best to use when running the games.

[Twiggy4K]

Your best bet is to always have your Android version up to date, you can do this by going to your Android settings > About my phone (usually), this way you can make sure that you at least have the latest drivers for your device. Secondly although recommended to always use the most recent version of Dolphin, updating once a month should be more than enough, unless there is some very specific issue fixed in a more recent build. (Tales of Phantasia springs to mind)

If you are still experiencing issues with your game in Dolphin, there are plenty of guides on youtube to find on how to configure Dolphin to run games smoothly on an Android device. Sadly enough all of them will need you to enable potentially game breaking options like underclocking your Emulated CPU or Turning off EFB/XFB and even go as far as having you edit .ini-files of specific games to turn off much needed options.

If you are willing to do all this, then you can get a relatively smooth experience on high-end smartphones nowadays as long as they have a Snapdragon 800 series SoC, any other SoC usually is missing too many features in their drivers for them to either run smooth or get anything to show on the screen at all.

Yes sir! I do always keep my phone updated as soon as the OTA updates come in so there isn't a problem there. I've looked up plenty of guides regarding issues with laggy games and most of them do not really explain or give details as to why it is happening which is why I decided to come here. 

If you could give me some more information on how underclocking the emulated CPU option helps the device or EFB/XFB also helps that would be great. I'm not very familiar with these options. The US T-Mobile variant I have runs the Snapdragon chipset and I've heard of the Exynos chipset having too many issues with Dolphin.

[mstreurman]

Yes sir! I do always keep my phone updated as soon as the OTA updates come in so there isn't a problem there. I've looked up plenty of guides regarding issues with laggy games and most of them do not really explain or give details as to why it is happening which is why I decided to come here. 

If you could give me some more information on how underclocking the emulated CPU option helps the device or EFB/XFB also helps that would be great. I'm not very familiar with these options. The US T-Mobile variant I have runs the Snapdragon chipset and I've heard of the Exynos chipset having too many issues with Dolphin.

Underclocking the Emulated CPU means exactly that: The CPU in the GC or Wii run at 485MHz  and 729MHz respectively and the underclocking/overclocking does is either run that emulated CPU at a lower or higher clockspeed than the original hardware. If you underclock by 10% (thus 90% clockspeed) it gets easier to emulate thus needing less power on the "host" system to emulate the CPU and if you overclock by 10% (thus 110% clockspeed) it gets harder to emulate. Underclocking can bring a lot of speed to slower machines but also creates a lot of game breaking issues like crashes, freezes, loops, strange behavior and so on and happens especially in games that need near perfect CPU timing to perform specific instructions.  The same is true for overclocking, but overclocking can make some games run faster than possible, give higher framerates in games that were having framedrops on the original hardware or make variable framerate games run at higher framerates.

EFB/XFB settings are framebuffers and these are either used to create some special effects (lensflares on Mariokart is one of the examples) or are needed for game specific tasks (Visor/scanning in the Metroid series) without these settings enabled you are either missing graphics or completely breaking the game depending on how much they are used and what for they are used.

Bounding box is also used in a couple of games (AFAIK only Paper Mario, but please dev's correct me if I'm wrong) and is needed to create some of the graphics correctly (IIRC going from 2-d to 3-d for example) without it graphics will be distorted, missing and the game will crash.

[JosJuice]

Bounding box is also used in a couple of games (AFAIK only Paper Mario, but please dev's correct me if I'm wrong) and is needed to create some of the graphics correctly (IIRC going from 2-d to 3-d for example) without it graphics will be distorted, missing and the game will crash.

Disney's Hide & Sneak
Disney's Magical Mirror starring Mickey Mouse
Disney's Mickey & Minnie Trick & Chase
Jacques Villeneuve's Racing Vision
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Super Paper Mario
Ultimate Spider-Man

...but if you're using a recent version of Dolphin, bounding box will be enabled automatically for all of these games anyway, so it's fine to have bounding box turned off in the global settings.

[Helios]

This all assumes your phone's GPU doesn't screw up on the implementation of bounding box, I've seen a couple reports from android users where they had the bounding box issues with paper mario despite that. So, YMMV on Android.

[Sievn]

I have the Snapdragon version of the S9+. I have also messed around with the Emulate CPU clock speeds and it said that if you have a more powerful device you can turn up the percentage more but this causes lag. So I would emulate lower than the 100% until I find a suitable and stable FPS? Since I'm trying to learn what most of the these interal features do, I want to know which would be the best to use when running the games.

on 30 FPS Games Use Emulator Clock speed : 40%
On 60 FPS Games use Emulator Clock Speed : 60-70%