Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I realize it's been awhile since I came here, last time I was here, I acted like a dick, in my opinion, it was well deserved, but some probably felt I was offending the emulator in the first place. I wasn't. Anyway.


I've been coming here the past few days looking for tips on how to get Dolphin at running on significant speeds on my machine.

I have Windows 7, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+(2.4 GHz) and with the newer builds, the emulator runs very sluggish. So for awhile, I put it down and started messing with PCSX2, to my surprise, it ran better than the Dlophin emulator, and game me exceptional speeds for some games. Final Fantasy X was almsot full speed and with a skipped framrate of 4 or 8, Budokai Tenkaichi 3 ran pretty well as too. After, I left emulation alone for awhile, than I resurfaced my interest with NullDC, a Dreamcast emulator. Which plays many of my favorites at either full speed, or almost. Then I went back to Dolphin.


I was determined, like a madman to get some good speeds on this rig. I don't have a job so upgrading will not be in my distant future unfortunately. "Damn, I REALLY want to play Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess" "Resident Evil" "Pokemon" "DAMN IT!".

My search began.

Well here we go.

For those with a PC similar to mine, or maybe a bit better but still want to get exceptional speeds, I recommend getting these revisions. Please don't PM me about anything related to this thread.

SVN 4460
SVN 4472
SVN 7564

These are really the only builds that you will get that has great speed(exceptionally)if you have a machine that is similar to my own. I will note that I beat Resident Evil 0 and the REmake on 3.0, with lighting disabled. The scenes were out of sync, but the speed wasn't all that bad. Close to full speed, this is probably because everything is pre-rendered but the player and NPCs.

Since I stumbled apon 7564 today [and has provided me with great speeds(exceptional)], I will be posting my settings for people out there. Out of these 3, choose what works best. 7564 has the best compatibility out of the others and also has exceptional speed. I also recommend getting PAL games. simply because their max FPS is 50, while anything else is 60, that way, the emulator isn't fighting to have more frames.

I reckon that the reason why these builds are faster is because they don't have as much code that the newer ones have, and thus, doesn't have to go through too much, this is the case with NullDC.

Dolphin Configuration

For the "General" tab, have the first 2 boxes checked. Frameskip at "Auto"(or off, maybe that will provide speed ups). Have "Skip GC Bios" chekced. JIT recompiler circled. And that's all.



For the "Display" tab, have Direct 3D9 enabled with 640x480 as the "Fullscreen Display Resolution". With it that low, the emulator doesn't have to go trying to draw more things on screen, which would create more slowdown. Have everything un-checked but "Use Panic Handlers".



For the Audio Tab, have DTK Music and Audio Throttle enabled.

Graphics Settings

For the "General Tab", have Aspect Ratio at Auto. Have all boxes un-checked but "Scaled EFB copy". Internal Resolution should be 1x Native and Anistrophic (what ever the Hell that means) should be 1x.

For "Hacks" Check "Ignore Format Changes" and have EFB copies at "Texture". For Texture Cache, have the slider at max, but you can also adjust it for games that need it to be adjusted, I had it at max for Four Swords Adventure. Eternal Frame Buffer, check disable. Check "Fast Minimaps" and "Disable Per-Pixel Depth".



For the "Advanced" tab, leave everything un-checked.

Now look closely at what I'm about to say.

There are other factors that you can utilize to increase performance.

For your games, right click them and click properties.

Game Proporties

For each game, un-check "Enable MMU" "Enable BAT" and "Accurate VBeam emulation". These aren't really necessary. In fact, they're purely optional, and is recommended for people who get full speeds any way they slice it. Also, disabled ZTP hack as that is for Twilight Princess(although I don't see how it improves performance on my end, Faron Woods is slow even still).



And there you all have it. Hopefully this thread helps those who are in my position. As for the SVN builds I listed above, you can find them on this site in the archive.

I'll say it again, these settings are for SVN r7564. I don't know how these settings fare with Wii games as I haven't played a Wii game yet(and probably won't, there's no telling how slow it'll be).

Have fun folks, and thanks to the creators of Dolphin. You guys fucking rock.[/i]

Old builds are not supported. You're obviously free to use them, but there is no forum support when you run into issues with them since the fix to any issue would be to not use that build and update to an official release or latest GIT build.

Well, I noticed a similar thread in that section, and it reaked of older builds. Not trying to butt heads, but why is that one still there?

Try r6505...