Slower Than Expected

[Meness]

Hello everyone,

I recently got this laptop (specs in my signature) for college. Now that I've settled into school a bit I decided I wanted to play some Brawl. I decided to go with the latest stable release, 4.0. To my dismay, it was really slow and stuttery. I concluded that maybe 4.0 was built for accuracy and forgone speed. So I downloaded the fastest revision I've had from past experience, r6515. Now although there are improvements over 4.0, or 3.0 (I tried this as well), it was much slower than my PC at home. My PC at home boasted a better graphics card, but it's processor was way way underpowered compared to my laptop's. And from what I know, Dolphin's speed depends on the processing power, right? So I set all my graphical enhancements down to bare minimum. No improvements. Therefore, it must be my processor?

What's going on? If anybody can help me out, that'd be great!

Edit : People seem to think I want to run it on 4.0? I don't. I'm wondering why it's slow on r6515.

[RachelB]

Yes, it's your processor. Your expectations are too high.

[Shonumi]

From Dolphin's point of view, it's your hardware that's slower than expected :p

If you gave us the specs for your desktop at home, we'd find that the CPU is better suited to Dolphin, given all you've told us so far. That laptop is an ultra-low voltage model or something. It can go up to 3.10 GHz (on 1 core iirc) but most likely it'll stay below that, especially when you consider throttling due to heat.

[Meness]

So Brawl can't be run on an i7? but run on an e5200?

Home PC specs:
Ati 4670 512MB GDDR3, Intel Dual Core E5200, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7

[Shonumi]

What Dolphin version are you using for the desktop? SSBB is a fairly lightweight game, but on 4.0, I'd expect there to be occasional or noticeable slowdowns with an E5200. Earlier builds (3.5 and below for example) ought to run fine.

[LordVador]

You're using a laptop. Here is your main problem

[Meness]

Like I said, from past experience, r6515 was the fastest one. So if my E5200 could run brawl on r6515, my i7 definitely can right? Anyway, I have an update to make. I just found out about the dolphin wii-network branch, so I decided to try the 3.5-2142 revision of that. Brawl ran perfectly. Internal res all the way up to 3x no problems. Donkey kong runs fast enough to be playable too, but the stuttering sound is pissing my ears off.

[LordVador]

Donkey kong runs fast enough to be playable too, but the stuttering sound is pissing my ears off.

That's because you can't run the game full-speed

[Shonumi]

The i7-3537U might not Turbo Boosting at all, so it could be stuck at 2 GHz. That's still a very low speed to be running Dolphin at. Verify what speed the 3537U is running at by using CPU-Z while playing Dolphin. Take a screenshot of the results so we can have a look.

[NaturalViolence]

It won't and shouldn't be hitting 3.1GHz under dolphin. 3.1GHz is the single core max turboboost.