I'm a bit confused at the speed boost I've just gotten...

[Pavlovtiger]

Right, so, I recently dug out Dolphin again and updated to the most recent version, good as gold, getting my New Mario Wii on as I should. My hardware isn't capable of running any games in 1080p, let alone with all the goodies turned on, the AA and per-pixel lighting in particular...or so I thought. Using my GTX 675m card, I could comfortably run at 1280x720 in full screen, 4x AA and 8x Anisotropic Filtering, in the DX9 settings field. Going to DX11 did basically nothing for me, and actually gave me a couple problems. Today, I turned the emulator on and, on a whim, tried DX11 again. And now, for no reason I can fathom, I get FPS too -fast- to be playable at full settings...1080p, AA and A-Filtering set to max, even the per-pixel lighting is on. I had to look up how to lock FPS to my desired amount in order to make Mario playable. And playable it is, beautiful, smooth, and utterly perfect.
Less than bragging (I'm not, really,) I'm confused at this in ways. What happened? The only things I've done -any- differently than the first time I ran Dolphin have been to grab version 3.0-735 as mentioned, switching to DX11 which didn't really work well before, and I did update my NVidia driver to their most recent one offered for my card. Now, even more oddly, I'll randomly click on Dolphin's graphics settings and see it's "reverted" to trying to use the Intel HD 4000 onboard graphics my computer shipped with too. I don't want it doing this, but it doesn't even seem to affect the performance, it's still running basically perfectly. I'm just....confused! @_@ It always keeps the other settings I tell it to use, resolution, enhancements, FPS limit, that all sticks, it just randomly defaults to the lesser GPU for some reason. I've even set the default in Windows to my GTX card, just not sure what's going on here.
As always, thank you for any insight anybody offers, and, cheers.

[ExtremeDude2]

Your GPU is definitely enough for the speeds you are getting now, a better question is why was it so slow before? :p My guess is dolphin was using your i7's "GPU" before.

[Rhys]

DX9 uses SSAA, whereas DX11 uses MSAA, so AA with DX9 is a lot slower. 4x SSAA literally doubles the output resolution on both axes and then shrinks it down (or quadruples?). If it were using the Intel chip it would go at a horrendous speed with 4x SSAA, even at 1280x720.

I also get a problem on my GTX 635M where DX9 is much slower than DX11 and OpenGL unless I enable the "3d Vision" option under enhancements, though this makes dolphin crash on alt tab and causes all sorts of problems. I think it's Optimus related.

[Pavlovtiger]

Ah, so it's just plain better to run in DX11 if supported then. No idea why it was so slow before, but it's definitely shiny-smooth now. Cheers.

[Zee530]

As ED2 said, it was probably using the HD 4000 before.

[lamedude]

Someone pressed the turbo button.
I hope someone else is old enough to get that.

[AnyOldName3]

Didn't those just boot into safe mode? My parents are that averse to replacing computers that the previous family one had one. The current family one is 7 years old, and was cheap even then.