Suggestion: Speed Hack

[Cherry44]

Please add a Speed Hack feature that can significantly increase speed.

This might be great for medium-end PCs.

[Shonumi]

Dolphin is already optimized to the point where it can easily run most games at fullspeed on mid-range hardware, and even a variety of low-range hardware depending on the game. Unless you're trying to run a really demanding game (see Rouge Squadron 2/3) and you're not running at resolutions too high for your GPU, Dolphin does fine. If a particular setup is too slow to adequately play Dolphin, it's probably not really meeting the definition of "mid-range".

At any rate, Dolphin as a project has historically eliminated such speed hacks in favor of accuracy. 2.0 and 3.0 were littered with such hacks. In the long run, it affects maintainability, clogging up the codebase in the process. It also affects the quality of the information we get when people report bugs. Speed hacks tend to break things, and not every user knows to disable hacks when reporting issues with the emulator.

If you're really interested in lowering Dolphin's hardware requirements, you can mess around with the emulated CPU spreed, e.g. drop it from 100% to 67%. This may make a game easier to emulate on your setup. On the other hand, doing that could also mess up how the game runs. Otherwise, Dolphin really isn't the sort of emulator that relies on speed hacks these days, especially when most hardware can run it without issue. Used to be you couldn't walk into a store and buy any random desktop and expect it to run Dolphin well enough, but times have certainly changed.

[Cherry44]

(12-15-2020, 03:01 PM)Shonumi Wrote: Dolphin is already optimized to the point where it can easily run most games at fullspeed on mid-range hardware, and even a variety of low-range hardware depending on the game. Unless you're trying to run a really demanding game (see Rouge Squadron 2/3) and you're not running at resolutions too high for your GPU, Dolphin does fine. If a particular setup is too slow to adequately play Dolphin, it's probably not really meeting the definition of "mid-range".

At any rate, Dolphin as a project has historically eliminated such speed hacks in favor of accuracy. 2.0 and 3.0 were littered with such hacks. In the long run, it affects maintainability, clogging up the codebase in the process. It also affects the quality of the information we get when people report bugs. Speed hacks tend to break things, and not every user knows to disable hacks when reporting issues with the emulator.

If you're really interested in lowering Dolphin's hardware requirements, you can mess around with the emulated CPU spreed, e.g. drop it from 100% to 67%. This may make a game easier to emulate on your setup. On the other hand, doing that could also mess up how the game runs. Otherwise, Dolphin really isn't the sort of emulator that relies on speed hacks these days, especially when most hardware can run it without issue. Used to be you couldn't walk into a store and buy any random desktop and expect it to run Dolphin well enough, but times have certainly changed.

Where I can set the Emulated CPU Speed?

[MayImilae]

And btw, don't go running to 3.0 or 2.0 expecting to get tons more performance. Optimizations in latest dev builds take advantage of modern hardware FAR better than 2.0 and 3.0. If run those hacky old builds on a modern system, you can expect -worse- performance on average compared to latest dev builds. Also those old versions be extremely glitchy and crashy in literally every game. This is why we moved away from "speed hacks". Not only do they terribly compromise our emulation, but they got in the way of us being able to implement the modern optimizations that make Dolphin so fast today!

[Shonumi]

(12-15-2020, 03:15 PM)Cherry44 Wrote: Where I can set the Emulated CPU Speed?

In Dolphin, hit the Config button (or from the menu go to Options -> Configuration) and switch to the Advanced Tab. Look for the CPU Options section and click the "Enable Emulated CPU Clock Override" and adjust the slider to some value below 100% to emulate a GC/Wii as if it had a slower CPU. Be very sure to read the description and warning inside Dolphin!