Gameplay and Audio Slowdown

[SonnieSlim1]

I am experiencing slowdown in gameplay for both games I have tried. I am curious if it could be my PC or something else I am overlooking.

In Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance the start up runs smooth and so does the main menu and character select but as soon as it loads the first cutscene it slows to a crawl even during gameplay and the audio sounds terrible

Metroid Prime ran inconsistent during the opening cutscene but the gameplay was fairly stable.

My PC isn't high end by any means but it does have an 8th gen Intel i5 CPU, and the Intel UHD Graphics 620. I wonder if its the Ghz for the CPU? When I purchased it it said Intel i5 8265U up to 3.9 Ghz but now that I have it the Task manager generally says its running at 1.6 to 2.0 Ghz. and it seems to fluctuate as Im playing.


Any advice or ideas would be appreciated. Thank you.

[mstreurman]

(04-26-2019, 04:17 PM)SonnieSlim1 Wrote: I am experiencing slowdown in gameplay for both games I have tried. I am curious if it could be my PC or something else I am overlooking.

In Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance the start up runs smooth and so does the main menu and character select but as soon as it loads the first cutscene it slows to a crawl even during gameplay and the audio sounds terrible

Metroid Prime ran inconsistent during the opening cutscene but the gameplay was fairly stable.

My PC isn't high end by any means but it does have an 8th gen Intel i5 CPU, and the Intel UHD Graphics 620.  I wonder if its the Ghz for the CPU? When I purchased it it said Intel i5 8265U up to 3.9 Ghz but now that I have it the Task manager generally says its running at 1.6 to 2.0 Ghz.  and it seems to fluctuate as Im playing.


Any advice or ideas would be appreciated. Thank you.

Probably your laptop:
1. A CPU with the U designation is an Ultra low power CPU meant for long battery life not high performance
2. UHD graphics 620 is not very fast
3. As this is a laptop you are probably running into the thermal constraints this is probably why you won't see the full 3.9GHz.

What can you do?
1. Keep all enhancements to a minimum e.g. 1xIR, no AA, no AF and so on.
2. Only play with your laptop plugged into power
3. Set your Windows power options to Maximum performance
4. Use the latest developer version
5. Use DirectX 12 as graphics back-end.
6. Cool the laptop as much as you can

If this doesn't help anything then there is nothing we can do to make it faster.

Also the games you are trying to run are quite demanding in the first place.

[JMC47]

That game is also really demanding, so it's not exactly uncommon to see it lagging even on high-end PCs.

[SonnieSlim1]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am running SNES and GBA emulators just fine so maybe I just bit off a little more than I could chew with trying to do GameCube. I will say tho. My Laptop isnt getting hot while running the games and the CPU was only running at about 50%.

I have seen people say they played GameCube through the Dolphin emulator on the Nvidia Shield TV. I wouldn't imagine that device runs faster than my laptop but Im no very tech saavy.

[JosJuice]

(04-27-2019, 02:39 AM)SonnieSlim1 Wrote: My Laptop isnt getting hot while running the games and the CPU was only running at about 50%.

Dolphin can only use two CPU cores (more or less), so if you have four CPU cores and the CPU is 50% used, that actually means Dolphin is using the CPU to the very limit of how much it can use it.

(04-27-2019, 02:39 AM)SonnieSlim1 Wrote: I have seen people say they played GameCube through the Dolphin emulator on the Nvidia Shield TV. I wouldn't imagine that device runs faster than my laptop but Im no very tech saavy.

It can run some games, but it can't run the more demanding games at full speed.

[Helios]

to answer the inevitable follow up question

https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldnt-dolphin-use-more-my-cpu-cores-go-faster