Sudden Slowdowns on Dolphin

[Mandraxon]

Specs:

NVIDIA GTX 1080
Intel i7

I'm trying to play Super Smash Bros Melee on Dolphin; I'm currently running the games on 3x resolution, 4x SSAA, 8x Anisotrophic Filtering, and FXAA as a post processing effect. About 2-3 minutes into my game, the emulation suddenly drops about 20 frames or more (30 - 46 FPS), and stays stuck in that frame range. The emulation can sometimes recover to 60 FPS after a few seconds, but this effect will often keep occurring until eventually, the game's frames just stays stuck in that range. Any ideas on what I could do?

I'm running Dolphin with all other big programs (including Steam, Firefox, and Discord) all closed before Dolphin is running. Asynchronous Shader Compilation (with Ubershaders) is on. My current Dolphin version is 5.0-10231 (should be the latest dev build).

EDIT: I should note that this actually happens on all of the games I try to play on Dolphin (other games include Chibi-Robo and Mario Kart Double Dash). The game starts and runs just fine at the beginning, but several minutes into the game, the frame rate drops by more than 20 frames all of a sudden, and then never seems to recover.

I've run Dolphin in the past with all games several months ago just fine on this PC, so I don't know why there seem to be these issues all of a sudden.

[DJBarry004]

Disable AA. Make sure that neither your CPU or your GPU are overheating.

What´s your actual CPU model by the way?

[Mandraxon]

My Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2601 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

Turning off AA did work. I'm not sure why AA is causing the sudden drops after a little bit of the game running; I've run AA successfully in the past at 4x SSAA max, with no problems and slowdowns at all.

EDIT: So after turning off AA and playing Super Mario Sunshine for about 5 minutes (with the 60 FPS Hack on), the frames again drop by 20 FPS or so. Not sure what to do now.

[Helios]

Guessing your system is getting confused by Dolphin's relatively weird system load and is thinking it can enter power saving states.

[JonnyH]

Or it's throttling due to hitting a thermal limit - HQ series chips are primarily used in laptops, after all.

Might be worth checking temperatures.

Or if it is the power saving modes kicking in, make sure you're plugged in, set "high performance" mode in windows power settings, and disabled any power saving modes in the nvidia driver control panel.

If that doesn't help, tools like "throttlestop" can be used to tweak the CPU power saving modes, but it is rather complex and could (if you're not careful and aren't sure what you're doing) make things worse