So here's the deal:
At first, it was 37 FPS in the first world of SMG2. Then it was 60 FPS, but the bushes were black with an occasional (and from what I could tell timed) flash of green. Then it was 45 FPS for a single run, and it still had black bushes, and now it is back to 37 FPS.
Here is a picture of the game (with FPS) and a picture of Precision X (the program EVGA made to overclock GPU's; I have it at default, factory settings, although it is FACTORY, not user, overclocked):
Skyward Sword also just crashed on me, just playing a repeating beep. The stats were the same as below, only instead of showing the memory clock it showed the voltage to be 950 (maybe it was warning me it got to high or something?)
Well, i ran Core Temp, CPU-Z and GPU-Z together to look at everything that was going on with my system while playing SMG2. Core Temp said that my CPU was never over 76% load on any core and GPU-Z said my GPU was at 83%-93%. Nothing slowed down (clock-wise), but i only got 47 FPS (in a different part of the game from before). CPU temps were below 60C always, and GPU temps were below 70C always. Just for kicks and giggles, i looked to make sure that the intel 4000 GPU wasnt doing anything, and it wasnt.
Unless my RAM is failing miserably, i have no solution for what is going on. ill go talk to some tech guys about my computer at micro center or something.
If ram was faulty it would freeze,restart,not lower your fps.
Gpu is probably faulty.
Dolphin is not a good way to solve this issue.
First,you can try to lower your gpu clock,maybe its overclocked too far ( evga is good company,but they dont test their overclocks properly - I had 8800 gt from them which wasnt stable at their factory clocks,it was long time ago but still ).
Try 900 instead of 950. Lower memory clock too.
You need to try demanding pc games,such as crysis 1 or 2 or metro or something like that and see if that can run and will you have problems there.
Also run prime95 program to test cpu stability,and loop canyon flight test of 3dmark06 program to test gpu stability.
You can also run 3dmark11 number of times to see if something will be wrong.
Also,run heaven benchmark.
Heaven benchmark (on default settings) gives me ~30.1 FPS. I also ran prime95 for 6 hours with no error. Intel burn test on very high 10x also had no error. I don't have any pc games to test the GPU with other than Starcraft II and that isn't all that new. Unless Dolphin makes a lot of reads to the HDD (which is 3Gb/s and somewhat old) and the CPU and GPU both outpace the HDD enough to lose 22 FPS, then I don't have a solution right now. Furmark didn't have any artifacts (although I didn't run that one very long). I'm just gonna reinstall Dolphin, and if that doesnt work ill make a backup of everything and reinstall Windows.
I FINALLY figured it out! As Natural Violence suggested, it was a GPU issue (kind of). There are two PCI E slots on my mobo. I tried one of them, but the GPU wasn't detected, so I put it in the other one. As it turns out, the slot I put it in was gimped to only x4 (while the other one that didn't detect my GPU was fully x16). After updating the BIOS, I was able to use the other slot, so now SMG 1&2 are running full speed, with 1080p and LLE. No slowdowns really (although I bumped my CPU up to 4.4 GHz again and will probably play with 2x IR, which is like 30 pixels less than 1080p on the vertical side, to make sure no slowdowns ever occur).
I'm sorry I bothered all of you with this. Thank you for helping me out by limiting the problems to the graphics card, which led me to find my eventual solution.
Hey, does it run full speed even without the overclock?.
Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 needs a Core i5-2500k @ 4.4GHz or a Core i5-3570k @ 4.2GHz to run @ fullspeed if LLE is enabled. With the "VBeam" option, the stock clock speed of the Core i5-3570k is propably enough. Anyway, in most cases, the mentioned CPUs and clock speeds are recommended.
LLE is to fix the background music in SMG1/2 to not stop playing right?
Yep. And in SMG2 it's additonally (afaik) needed to grab the grand stars.