Games not working properly in Dolphin 4.0.2

[DaveKluss]

I've been using Dolphin 3.5-367 for a while now and I've been able to run pretty much any game I've tried perfectly, I tried updating to 4.0.2 today and now every game I load seems to have some sort of issue with the speed.. Wind Waker is extremely choppy and slow, Pikmin 2 is slow and other games have similar issues although these are the main two games I play on Dolphin so they're the only ones I'm particularly worried about. I've made sure I have exactly the same settings as in 3.5-367 but that doesn't help at all.

It's not a huge issue as I can still use 3.5-367 just fine, but can anyone tell me why this is happening with the new version?

[Shonumi]

Wind Waker forces LLE audio by default (even if your settings under DSP say HLE audio). To change this right-click the game in Dolphin and go to Properties, then check HLE audio. Do note that this will cause issues for you (see the wiki for more details + workarounds that don't involve LLE audio).

Dolphin 4.0.2 may run slower than previous revisions in some games due to the fact that it is more accurate in its emulation and requires more from your hardware to do it. In your case, your CPU is not fast enough to keep up with this stable release version. You can try to OC your CPU, get a faster CPU (try to go for Haswell, benchmarks show they're the best bang for your buck in Dolphin, AMD's CPUs are currently very behind Intel in Dolphin), or stick to an older revision. If you do stick to 3.5-367 or anything older than 4.0, you won't get any help here since old builds are not supported.

[RachelB]

The real solution is to try newer builds, not older, because dolphin has gotten a lot faster since 4.0.

[Shonumi]

The real solution is to try newer builds, not older, because dolphin has gotten a lot faster since 4.0.

It might not be fast enough to counteract the performance loss of LLE audio in the case of Wind Waker though, given the OP's hardware. Sometimes there's no getting around slow hardware.