Is Dolphin doomed to run slow on my PC?

[PokePoindexter]

Hello,

I recently downloaded Dolphin 5.0 on my laptop. I'm able to run Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness on it, but the audio stutters nonstop and the game slows to a snail's pace in almost every circumstance except when I'm in a battle or have the Pokemon menu open. I've tried just about every configuration and graphics setting possible to see if I can get the game to run faster, but to no avail. My PC isn't technically a gaming PC per se, but it can run several actual PC games well, as well as easily running a couple of other emulators without any problems, so I figure it's probably one of two things: 1) There's something else I need to do besides modify the configurations or graphics, or 2) My PC isn't capable of running it (which I would hope isn't the problem, since my PC is younger than the emulator).

My specs:
Processor: AMD A8-7410 APU, x64-based
Graphics: AMD Radeon R5
4 GB RAM
64-bit operating system
Windows 10

I apologize if I come across as naive or if there's an obvious step I missed here; this is not my area of expertise, so it's possible I did. Any help I can get would be appreciated.

[Ivybridge11]

Hello,

I recently downloaded Dolphin 5.0 on my laptop.  I'm able to run Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness on it, but the audio stutters nonstop and the game slows to a snail's pace in almost every circumstance except when I'm in a battle or have the Pokemon menu open.  I've tried just about every configuration and graphics setting possible to see if I can get the game to run faster, but to no avail.  My PC isn't technically a gaming PC per se, but it can run several actual PC games well, as well as easily running a couple of other emulators without any problems, so I figure it's probably one of two things: 1) There's something else I need to do besides modify the configurations or graphics, or 2) My PC isn't capable of running it (which I would hope isn't the problem, since my PC is younger than the emulator).

My specs:
Processor: AMD A8-7410 APU, x64-based
Graphics: AMD Radeon R5
4 GB RAM
64-bit operating system
Windows 10

I apologize if I come across as naive or if there's an obvious step I missed here; this is not my area of expertise, so it's possible I did.  Any help I can get would be appreciated.

 There's not really much you can do about it unfortunately. The only way a pre-Ryzen AMD processor can really play Dolphin acceptably is by having a lot of raw clockspeed, and as a laptop processor your just can't do that. Intel based laptops newer than the 4th gen Haswell can do a bit better because Intel did some kind of voodoo with Haswell that inexplicably makes it and later versions of their processors a lot faster in dolphin, but lower power laptop CPU's just struggle in general.
Dolphin is changed so much that the date it was 'released' doesn't mean much, the hardware requirements have changed quite a bit since then and it makes a lot of use of newer features.
You might get a slightly better experience by using a Dev build, there have been a lot of changes since stable 5.0, so I'd suggest at least trying that.
As an example for CPU speeds, my Athlon actually has a similar architecture to yours but it uses 95 watts rather than 15 and I've overclocked it to 4.4Ghz. It plays most games fairly well, but not the really demanding stuff, and that's with about double the clock speed.