Getting Dolphin to run better on Mac

[JosJuice]

As said earlier in the topic, you should use a development version of Dolphin, not 4.0.

[Milyc]

Well, I went to the Development Versions on this page:

https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

And downloaded versions 4.0-9179 (the most recent one) and 4.0-915.8. I didn't notice changes, or perhaps they have been to the worse, as FPS count still takes the more than occasional deeps to as low as below 10 on crowded screens...

[degasus]

Current development versions are much faster for the CPU, but require a faster GPU. While is indeed the case for *most* users, I'm not sure if this fits your requirement on this laptop. First, it's an intel sandy bridge GPU, and second, the OSX driver. This combination is quite bad for dolphin.

So, 4.0 is likely better if you want to render in HD. Development versions are likely better in native resolutions, but this might require windows via bootcamp for compatible drivers. If you want to try this, choose the D3D backend, as the intel OGL driver on windows isn't that good either... But this combination should provide the fastest emulation

[Milyc]

I went ahead and downloaded 4.0-9177, as it is the only one in which D3D appears. Well, the changes, if anything, were for the worse, as frame rate was still terrible.

Guess that, unless I am missing some proper Dolphin configuration, my Mac simply isn't cut for it, as mentioned. One thing, though, is that Eternal Darkness runs very well on it, as it did, to a lesser extent but still better than the other games, on my old Windows-powered notebook.

[Milyc]

Well, I've been trying one emulator after the next, in the hopes of getting it to work as I really want it to. I am trying the newest stable version on Mac right now and most games are playable. Some of them, like Tales of Symphonia, are running just fine. Others, like Resident Evil 2 and Skies of Arcadia Legends and Sonic Adventure DX, are running well but with serious sound problems. Any tips on how exactly I can solve that? If I do it, I'd say this will (finally) be done with!

[degasus]

The sound problem is related to the slowdown. Your emulated Wii generates too few samples, so it will stutter...

Bad luck, there are only hacks to improve the CPU performance. But I guess your bottleneck is the GPU. Just to be sure, you render at native resolution?

You can try to use the custom build in https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version . This fork tries to merge as many improvements of the official dolphin tree, but it has skipped an accuracy improvement which increased the GPU requirement a lot. So it may be perfect for your requirements. The downside: Bugs, less tested, experimental, might kill kittens, ..., please don't report issues with this build anywhere in this forum but in this single thread.

[Milyc]

I tried downloading the first file from the provided link (the one with the .7z extension at the Downloads section) on my Windows notebook to later transfer it to Mac, but it had more than 1000 errors while I was unzipping the file.

As for the resolution, I haven't tried any specific configuration change yet.