Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi guys,

I have a feeling this is probably normal and has been discussed before, but something strange I noticed -- Dolphin isn't using 100% of my CPU in games where it can't drive 60FPS stable (which is really only F-Zero GX). It's using both cores, but only at around 70%.

This would seem to indicate that my GPU is bottlenecking rather than my CPU, but I didn't think that was at all likely in an emulator such as this... (and, in fact, AA and AF have no impact on my performance, which is another reason why I'd never have expected this to be the case).

For the record, my machine specs are:
Pentium Dual-Core E6300 @3.33ghz (slight OC, comparable to low-end first-gen i5)
4GB DDR2 @close to 1ghz
Radeon 4850 (625/1100) 512mb.

It's by no means a super rig -- I built it for $400 three years ago -- but I can't understand what's causing this apparent non-bottleneck. Advice would be appreciated!

Your video card is fine, you just need more processing power. Some games are more demanding than others, if you can push that CPU a little higher, it will gain you some more speed. If that's not enough, you'll need a more powerful CPU.

Okay, thanks. I had a feeling that it might be a cache issue (that wouldn't necessarily be reflected in the CPU usage indicator), given that it stutters now and then when loading assets in F-Zero GX.

Again, it's always been just this one game that I can't get fullspeed on, so I'm not terribly concerned, I just wanted to make sure that despite the fact that it isn't using all of the CPU, it's still a CPU bottleneck.