New Lenovo laptop, Dolphin stutters on every game

[bangawasawa]

Hi,
a new user here.
Fantastic work with the emulator, really admirable.
Still, I was hoping a new laptop could run most GC games without problems...
I recently bought this Lenovo IdeaPad z580 (Intel i5-3210M / 4GB / 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT635M, Win 8 64-bit) and am a bit surprised that this emulator cannot run the games I tested fluently (RE Zero, Paper Mario, Skies of Arcadia, Metroid Prime), every game has stuttering sound and slow-downs in animation, they are playable but it IS annoying.The worst of them is RE Zero - that is virtually unplayable. I am sure I must be doing something wrong and would appreciate any advice.
I followed the guidelines how to set the performance though...
And as a side-note, the same laptop can emulate PS2 MORE FLUENTLY which I found baffling. The latest release of PCSX2 can run FFXII and MGS 3 Snake Eater almost flawlessly, and I always thought PS2 was harder to emulate(?)
Thank you in advance for any info, much appreciated.

[admin89]

Depending on the games , there are many demanding Wii/GC games
Some GC games are even more demanding than Wii games (of course , your CPU is not fast enough for those games)
You need to verify these :
_Dolphin is using Nvidia GPU or Intel HD 4000
_Have you tried Settings for speed yet ? Your GPU is capable of running most games with 2.5x Internal Resolution , no Anti-Aliasing , 16 AF
_Your CPU must not be underclocked while Dolphin is running . Use Realtemp to check your CPU clock speed . Make sure you have battery setting as high performance mode

[Shonumi]

bangawasawa Wrote:And as a side-note, the same laptop can emulate PS2 MORE FLUENTLY which I found baffling. The latest release of PCSX2 can run FFXII and MGS 3 Snake Eater almost flawlessly, and I always thought PS2 was harder to emulate(?)

It's a different emulator for a different system using different code to run different games. You can't linearly compare them like that. Some games in PCSX2 are more demanding than Dolphin games (Killzone vs. Time Splitters 2 GC ver.) Some will be just the opposite. Just look at bsnes; it demands quite a bit of power for SNES games (the trade-off is accuracy though). At any rate though, PCSX2 is generally less demanding than Dolphin, not always, but that's what you'll tend to get.

[bangawasawa]

Thank you both, very interesting. I have followed your guidance to the letter, but it still stutters. Most of those changes, by the way, make no visible difference ( at least to my untrained eye).
Setting the laptop to high performance also did not help. It still stutters. Perhaps the CPU is not up to the task?
Well, one can't have everything I guess, but I am very happy that at least the PS2 emulation runs well.

[bangawasawa]

it's me again. I must apologize for this thread. I just reinstalled Dolphin and it now works like a charm. Have no idea what was wrong before, but I suspect I might had downloaded a wrong version. This one's 64 bit and it really is smooth. Thanks once again for the emulator, great job guys.