"I'm running a 2.33ghz clocked at 2.46ghz Intel Dual Core e6550, w/2 gigs of ram and a x1900 ATI radeon g card, on a windows 32bit OS."
So I'm rockin' the revision 4814 dolphin and getting super speed! Everything's great. But then I noticed that the longer I played, the lower the fps got until it bottomed out at about 50%. I just can't figure it out. What changes over time as you play, that will make the fps gradually drop like that? I'm thinking its my computer somehow seeing as if I shut dolphin down and start it up again immediately, the fps is more or less as I left it. But if I wait a while and start dolphin up, the fps shoots up and gradually decreases again as I play.
What do I do?
Why are you using such an old revision?
Sounds like a memory leak/dolphin not clearing cache. Also, old revision is old.
I'm using this old revision because it actually gives me full speed. The latest one is slow as all getup for some reason...
Actually using 2.0 stable build gives the same result...
Fast at first, and gradually decreasing.
is it overheating/throttling?
I am thinking that actually. If I turn the computer off for several hours, turn it on and play dolphin immediately, it will actually run perfectly at full speed for a good while, but will eventually slow down.
The thing is, I have other games on my computer as well that use hefty graphics processing, but they will run at full speed 100% of the time. Only dolphin does this whole gradual performance decrease, and I have no idea why.
Dolphin requires heaps more processing power; it's not a computer game it's a program that tries to copy the hardware of the Wii using software. Your computer is actually quite slow for what some games requires on Dolphin.
Try the latest revision since 2.0 is VERY old:
http://www.dolphin-emu.org/download.html
The newer revisions may run a bit slower for you, but they are also (generally) more stable. If the problem still occurs, my first guess would be something on your end, such as a background program causing problems. Seeing as you did not mention what game you are playing, it's hard to give you any other specific advice.
Its not even a Wii game!! Its Naruto Ninja Taisen 3! I would think that I could at least run a gamecube game without issue....
Edit:
Waittaaaaminute...my compy's not slow....is what i keep telling myself.
Dolphin SVN 3374, w/framelimiting. Will give constant unbelievable speed and bottoms out at a reasonable framerate when limited, and thus that is the SVN i will be using until I see something better, which for the moment doesn't seem to exist.(well, at least not for gamecube games).
Listen, I'm not a big time developer myself but I think that the developers need to slow down; pull it back a notch and revisit some of the older builds, because they seem to have some handy stuff. I'm just saying, I'm getting better results from a build some 2000+ versions back.....unless of course the latest versions of dolphin are optimized for the Wii, and cutting edge systems only......
Which is going to suck for those P4 fans....
Pre-4000 builds are great for certain gamecube games, even if playing on low-powered rigs with old hardware.
If you are lucky you can even find revs which will play games at 60fps that would otherwise be maybe 20-30 at most on 6300+ because emulation has been more focused on accuracy than speed for a long time
There is no reason to upgrade builds if you just play older games and have no need for newer options like efb scaling, antialiasing, hybrid wiimote plugin etc.
(if that newer build is more than halving the framerates, hence making games unplayable for your pc)