Unable to keep steady FPS

[TmTigran]

I am trying to use the dolphin emulator, but I'm unable to get good stable FPS in games, and especially the movies. This seems to be the Wii and NGC games.

Now I know I don't have a computer so weak that I can't get Sonic Colors or Chocobos Mysterious dungeon to run right at 720. So can I get some help please?

I am using Dolphin 4.0-9426

And my specs are

Windows 10
GPU: Gefore FTX 750 Ti
CPU: i7-477OK CPU @ 3.50
Ram: 8 GB

[Helios]

Yeah. Your hardware is absolutely fine, and you're using a dev build like a sane person. Sonic Colors is a pretty demanding game, but nothing that hardware can't handle.

Often times problems like this is caused by a bad setting either from a version upgrade where we clobbered a setting or the user changed a setting and forgot about it.

Do something for me. Close Dolphin. Go to Documents/Dolphin Emulator/config and delete dolphin.ini and gfx.ini. Re-open Dolphin, now test your games without changing any settings. Does it work?

If yes, go ahead and adjust your internal resolution to be close to your display and you should be fine.

Now a days the most users need to change in terms of settings is internal resolution and anti aliasing. Maybe some AR codes + cheats if they're messing with widescreen.

[TmTigran]

I had already tied that by removing dolphin completely, and I mean -completely, all .inis and all folders in documents directory.. everything.- and re-installed. Same problem.

I am trying another step that -may- be the problem.

[Helios]

Then the other possibilities are driver issues, your OS doing something dumb, or CPU clock speed being dumb. That config is very similar to mine (Haswell/Devils Canyon CPU, Maxwell GPU) and I haven't hit this issue.

[JMC47]

Monitor your computer load during play and see if you can see anything.

[TmTigran]

I actually found the problem, though it was Helios that gave me the idea with the "Driver".

No, it isn't a driver, or my OS, or my CPU... No, it's that the HDD I was using *Maybe because it's external, or may be just slow* was causing the issues. Transfered everything to my internal HDD and it works.

Thanks for the help though.

[leolam]

Hmm, that's weird; a hard drive is very rarely the bottleneck as it's already much faster than a DVD drive.

[degasus]

Yeah, we don't use asynchronous file access. So while the original dvd driver will not block the game, on dolphin, a slow disk does. For performance, we expect the OS to cache and prefetch the image. Sounds like Windows has disabled this for your external drive...

[TmTigran]

So, I'm back with another problem. Other games seem to run well, but Super Mario Sunshine keeps dropping frames, especially at the begining of a level.

[jasonridesabike]

Can confirm, had the same issue running off an external hdd on a pc with similar specs.