Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I recently upgraded my graphics card from a GTS-450 to a GTX-650 (hey, it only cost $25 total). I made a list of FPS I was getting from the loading points of several games on every backend, then after installing the 650 I tested the new speeds at the exact same load spots, using dolphin 3.5-160 for the tests.

My initial result was that all games ran 3-6fps faster, but later the speeds changed. Mario Galaxy 2 with OpenGL at 3xIR with LLE had run at 67fps with the GTS-450, and then 70fps right after installing the GTX-650, but later the same night it was only running 55fps with the 650 using the same settings. Skyward sword's file selection screen with D11 at 4xIR had run at 23fps with the GTS-450 and 26fps right after installing the 650, but later ran at only 22fps.

I tried again the next day and just once managed to get SMG 2 to run at 70fps again, but only once. Every other time it went back to 55fps. Skyward Sword was the same, it stuck at 22fps and I could not reproduce the 26fps I originally recorded with the GTX-650.

I uninstalled the graphics driver (310.90- the 450 and 650 use the same driver) and cleared any registry errors but it did nothing. I ran GPU-z and CPU-z and found no abnormal issues when running the games. Only when I went back to the 3.5 stable did the problem disappear, and from there I tested different revisions until hitting the slower speeds again with 3.5-147. I get the faster speeds I initially recorded for the GTX-650 when using 3.5-145 or any earlier version of 3.5, but from 3.5-147 on it runs much slower regardless of backend or game (though Mario Galaxy 2 is hit harder than anything else).

I can't account for why there would be such a large speed difference between these different revisions nor do I know why the problem apparently didn't affect my GTS-450. With 3.5-160, my 450 managed to get 67fps in SMG2, which is 12fps faster than the 650 using the same revision and settings. Is there any reason why a faster card would suffer slowdowns like this to the point where it's outperformed by an older and slower card, but only on the newer revisions? I also can't explain why the GTX-650 initially managed to provide faster speeds on the newer builds, only to become much slower within a matter of hours.

Any advice would be appreciated. For now I can keep using 3.5-145 and still enjoy a performance improvement over my old card, but I would like to find a solution so I can use newer builds again soon.

The best advice is to use the official 3.5 stable release. Anything else is a development build and is not for everyone. The official release was made for people to play their games without having to worry about all of the issues that may be found in the development builds.

Using the last working version is my strategy for now, but I'd like to find out what this problem is and I'm willing to do any sort of testing if a dev wants to look into it. Just a few weeks ago I had a problem with OpenGL glitching that seemed pretty rare, but thanks to my complaining here the devs managed to fix it So far I haven't heard of anyone else experiencing this issue, which concerns me that someone may be wrong with my system/new card.

I experience a lot of crashes in the revisions after 3.5... i haven't checked them all, but 3.5-125 and a few back (possibly forward too) crash from the start on mac (that is, the start of the rom... not the program). I tried tons of roms and i'd agree, revisions can suck or be brilliant. Hey, is there any way i can get an admin's attention on my threads? because i really wanna talk in depth about some problems i've been having.

I wanted to update to say that the speed problem still persists with the newer revisions, as well as Nvidia's newest 314.07 driver. Using 3.5-417 gave me speeds up to 28fps slower than 3.5 or 3.5-145.