Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So Dolphin is running pretty slowly. Start menu on "Beyond Good and Evil" is a nice high 60s, and then it drops down to under 20.

First of all, I have looked around the forums and the web as a whole and have tried adjusting Dolphin settings accordingly, with little to no net gain. Generally it seems the changes work for a user, the user gives up on getting Dolphin to work, or his computer isn't up to snuff. The changes I've read about haven't worked for me, and I think my computer should be able to handle it (a quick glance at task manager shows there's plenty of resources to be had if Dolphin wants them, and I think my graphics card is fine as well; this might be a slightly dated machine, but it's still a gaming machine).

All of my driver software is up to date.

I've included screenshots using CPU-Z and GPU-Z as suggested by your forums, as well as screenshots of the Dolphin settings.

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

GPU-Z:


CPU-Z:


Dolphin (Dolphin-win-x64-r7687):



Among other speed tutorials to arrive at the setup above, I've used:
http://www.dolphin-emu.org/performance.html
And
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=11388

However, the gain is... minimal. Not enough to have the game playable.

If my view of my quad core/4GB RAM setup is over inflated, and I have no business expecting decent speeds out of my computer in the first place, just let me know and that should be a quick "fix." =P

I was looking at buying a second card of 4GB RAM for my machine. Not sure if that'd help; as I said before Task manager claims I have plenty of RAM left if Dolphin wants it, ~40% of my RAM. ~65% of my CPU is free as well, if Task Manager isn't telling a little fib.

Any help as to speeding this up would be more than welcome, as I can't seem to find any thread/site that is helping.

Thanks in advance.

Enable Lock Threads to Cores...

Ah, thank you for that suggestion. I'm up to 20-30 FPS and Speed 26%.

Anything I might do to speed it up a touch more?

Uncheck all the Other in the Hacks-Stuff, since that's not needed.

And btw, please set Internal Resolution to Auto.
Also uncheck RAM, that should do the trick

Virtual ram, uncheck that....unless it breaks the game, it speeds up almost every single game on the emulator. Playing the regular beyond good and evil for pc would be better it seems if you really wanted to play this game specifically, and look a hell of a lot better than your settings for this emulator now. That clock speed seems really really low, 1.6ghz? I'm ignorant with laptop processors, but that seems unbelievably low to be called an i7, even a mobile i7. Is that like before turbo boost or whatever they do to speed up?

(07-30-2011, 07:38 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: [ -> ]Uncheck all the Other in the Hacks-Stuff, since that's not needed.

And btw, please set Internal Resolution to Auto.
Also uncheck RAM, that should do the trick

Idiot, don't advice people to switch IR to Auto for no reason, especially if they want to speed up stuff.

Auto is MUCH slower than native resolution, and also causes bugs in some games.

They claim it turbo boosts to 2.8ghz.

Of course since Dolphin and Windows 7 combined aren't using half of my CPU maximum output, maybe I am getting around there.

I went ahead and made the changes (although I didn't set the internal resolution to auto in light of Neobrain's comment, but if you think it's still worth a shot I'll go ahead and try). I gained ~2 FPS in some parts, ~10 FPS in others, leaving me still mid-to-high 20s for large spans of time. Oddly enough the menu screen is somewhat slower. This doesn't really concern me, just saying if this gives any insight to you guys.

Concerning doing it PC, that is a thought, but "Beyond Good and Evil" is just the first one I was working on; hoping to expand beyond it if the performance is enjoyable.

Still open to any other suggestions if you guys have any, but I'm doing far better than I was when I started this thread.

Dolphin does not use more than 2 cores, so if for example you have 4 cores, you'd be at around 50-60% usage with dolphin and other regular processes going. That's normal.

I don't know the gc version of BG&E, is it supposed to run at 60fps? Meaning 20fps would for example only be like 33% regular speed and 30fps 50% speed. You can drop frames in regular pc games without affecting speed, that's how they're made, but dropping any here will slow down and that is your problem obviously. 60fps might just be rough on your computer especially considering this game has high draw distances and large areas. You're getting basically 0 use out of that graphics card, especially at native resolution with 0 AA, whereas your computer should kill the pc port of this game, assuming the port is any good. I don't know about it specifically. 30fps games might be a lot more playable for you.

Hmm, well then.

All right I guess I'll go with your advice. Is there anywhere I can find a master list of games and their FPS, by chance?

Not that I know of. I detail any 60fps in my youtube videos when I see them. So like out of those...both lost kingdoms games, summoner a goddess reborn, eternal darkness and fzero gx all on gamecube. Kirby's epic yarn as well. I didn't record that because it slows to a crawl in some spots, doesn't feel like decent material on my computer. Seems that 60fps is more common on GC, from what I've personally seen.

Duh, I lied, right when I hit post I remembered this thread
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=17139&highlight=fps

Should be a bit helpful atleast, but even still running zelda TP at 30fps is still harder than say killer7 at 30fps, so it's not really a great measurement. This game here just seems fairly intense if is a 60fps title.