GTX 950M + i5 7200u for Wii games in 1080p?

[whymeo]

Heya. I've been trying to run Super Mario Galaxy at 1080p on my laptop with no luck. Drops to about 50 fps fairly regularly, which is annoying cause of the lag and audio stuttering. The specs on my laptop are:

GPU: GTX 950M
CPU: i5-7200u @ 3.1 GHz
RAM: 8 GBs
Operating System: Windows 10
Power management mode is set to “prefer maximum performance” in the Nvidia control panel.

Dolphin Settings (5.0-4958 x64):
Backend: Direct3D 11
Adapter: Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M
Internal Resolution: 3x native (1920x1584)
Anti-Aliasing: none
Anisotropic Filtering: 1x
Ubershaders: hybrid

Is my system just not good enough to run a game like Super Mario Galaxy at 1080p, or is there some tweaks I could do to get it to run at 60 fps at 1080p? The CPU clock dropped a measly 6 MHz while testing, so I don't believe it's throttling due to heat. GPU clock stayed consistent as well.

[mbc07]

Super Mario Galaxy is one of the most demanding titles to emulate in Dolphin, so even through your laptop (probably) can handle other GC/Wii games at full speed in 1080p, your current specs are a little on the low side and thus it can't handle this game at 1080p without FPS drops. Regarding audio, you can enable "Audio Stretching" option to prevent stuttering when emulation speed drops below 100%...

[whymeo]

Ah, I didn't realize Super Mario Galaxy was one of the most demanding games hardware wise. Guess I'll just have to use 720p. Are there any downsides/glitches to that audio stretching option you mentioned?

[Helios]

I wouldn't really call it the most demanding when it doesn't even need full MMU, but yeah, it's up there.

[JosJuice]

(01-02-2018, 04:06 PM)whymeo Wrote: Are there any downsides/glitches to that audio stretching option you mentioned?

The only downside is that the audio latency increases a bit.

[sirdaniel]

Try also setting high performance after rightclicking on battery icon in tray.
I believe that pal version (50 FPS) would be less demanding, try if thats possible on your side.
Run game once or twice for some time so shaders could be cached.
Set Dual core in general setting, last time i downloaded dolphin it was disabled, i had to manually enable. (at least i dont remember setting it off manually)

I hope those are not silly advices.

[Craftyawesome]

(01-03-2018, 07:40 AM)sirdaniel Wrote: I believe that pal version (50 FPS) would be less demanding, try if thats possible on your side.

Maybe if you are gpu bottlenecked it would work. More often you are cpu bottlenecked and the situation wouldn't improve.

[sirdaniel]

Thats general rule for general applications. But from my little experience i notice that cpu load and gpu load are not just separated in emulation applications. Its like when you lower internal resolution it may decrease cpu load, and same otherwise, increasing internal resolution can increase load on cpu unit in PC.

I guess at least trying IR 2x may shed some light on it.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

(01-05-2018, 06:43 AM)sirdaniel Wrote: But from my little experience i notice that cpu load and gpu load are not just separated in emulation applications. Its like when you lower internal resolution it may decrease cpu load, and same otherwise, increasing internal resolution can increase load on cpu unit in PC.

That's only half true for Dolphin as it separates the emulated CPU and the emulated GPU into two separate threads.

If the GPU load increases the load of the emulated GPU thread, this would indeed increase the total CPU load. However, as the load on the emulated CPU thread should be greater than the load on the emulated GPU thread, the maximum observed CPU utilization on a per-core basis should not be any different unless the higher overall CPU utilization causes greater heat output resulting in greater throttling and therefore lower clocks.

[JosJuice]

(01-06-2018, 01:24 PM)Nintendo Maniac 64 Wrote: That's only half true for Dolphin as it separates the emulated CPU and the emulated GPU into two separate threads.

Unless you're using single core mode. Also, if the game accesses the EFB from the CPU, the CPU emulation performance will be affected by the GPU performance because the CPU emulation thread will be blocked by the GPU occasionally.