Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello there. this is my first post and.. hello


i'm in to emulation since late 90's starting with bleem and Mame such. and still emulating and tracking developments with enthusiasm, trying to get infos and help people as much as i can. i hope i'll be helpful by here too, but think i've been a bit late ^^

so long story short, there's a problem i couldnt choose which forum part it belongs to, better writing over here. if its not, sorry for that.

i'm using dolphin since about 5 years. it's been a lotta change since, hardware, dolphin itself, speed... But today, i've struggled alot about the emulation speed. last year i was getting pretty good performance regardless of little bit graphical detail reduction with Athlon 64 x2 at 2.6 GHz and Radeon HD3650 512mb, 2gb of ram. Now i have Phenom II x4 3.4 ghz and HD7950, but cannot get a speed over 40-45 fps with same games. i couldnt figured out how.

Tried Dolphin 3.5 and latest .367
hence Control Center has everything leaved to software, and dolphin has default settings.
ive ticked/unticked as most settings as possible to speed up emulation but nope. fps is wawing low and high all the time despite vsync and limit. roaming around 20-25 and 40-45 at most.
Tried all dx9,11 and opengl and had same results. its so frustrating especially when you're in a happiness of getting a new GPU.

i'll again write down my specs properly

Amd Phenom II x4 965 BE at 3.4 GHz
Radeon HD7950 3gb 384 bit, factory OC'd to 925MHz
a single 4gbs of 2000mhz ram
A clean install of windows 7 x64, having just few programs and not even an antivirus or similiar software to keep pc busy or slowdown.
have latest chipset and graphical drivers (13.8 beta), without having any problems playing Civilization V at top settings. shouldnt be the driver.

also i couldn't get access tounofficial speedup thread, maybe because ive registered recently and had no posts.

Hoping that i can get any help from here. anything would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Dolphin has gotten more and more demanding due to improvements, etc.

You're using 3.5-367 that isn't the latest build. The latest build is 3.5-1729 that is even more demanding

First of all revision 367 is not the latest, in fact, it's way outdated by now so go to the download site https://dolphin-emu.org/download/ and download the latest revision. Second of all emulations don't work the same as normal pc games: a pc game can run you a demanding game at 60fps on max settings but in an emulation it could run a not so demanding game at less framerate and this is because emulated games put a lot more load on the CPU given that the language used to play games on a normal console has to be converted for it to work on a standard pc cpu. Try ticking on VBeam speedhack, tick idle skipping too and set EFB copy to texture, enable fast depth calculation, set CPU emulation to JIT recompiler and enable dual core

Use 3.5 if you want more speed.

(08-10-2013, 07:02 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Use 3.5 if you want more speed.

This ^, and if you want to use that revision and have a higher fps try overclocking your CPU.

(08-10-2013, 06:55 AM)LordVador Wrote: [ -> ]Dolphin has gotten more and more demanding due to improvements, etc.

You're using 3.5-367 that isn't the latest build. The latest build is 3.5-1729 that is even more demanding

wow what a welcoming message

i didn't knew that they'd request more resources in every build high. thanks for the tip. so i'd better use and work on 3.5 settings.

(08-10-2013, 06:58 AM)linker357 Wrote: [ -> ]First of all revision 367 is not the latest, in fact, it's way outdated by now so go to the download site https://dolphin-emu.org/download/ and download the latest revision. Second of all emulations don't work the same as normal pc games: a pc game can run you a demanding game at 60fps on max settings but in an emulation it could run a not so demanding game at less framerate and this is because emulated games put a lot more load on the CPU given that the language used to play games on a normal console has to be converted for it to work on a standard pc cpu. Try ticking on VBeam speedhack, tick idle skipping too and set EFB copy to texture, enable fast depth calculation, set CPU emulation to JIT recompiler and enable dual core

i'm not after latest possible build, i'm after reliability and speed so thats why i've tried out that build. i've downloaded it a quite time ago so it was on my backup disk. just used again.

to your second of all, i'm aware of that behavior, that emulation depens on Cpu utmostly. that's why i especially mentioned my gpu type and speed in title. also i'm not saying that if a pc game runs nice then should be the emulation. i only gave that civilization example to state that there's no driver, graphics or hardware flaw in my system.

i roamed carefully around all of the emulation options including those you've recommend, even tried different combinations or single game specific settings but no result, maybe a few fps moar.


i only want gameplay and visual accuracy and perception. never interested in graphical details in gaming eversince.

(08-10-2013, 07:05 AM)linker357 Wrote: [ -> ]

(08-10-2013, 07:02 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Use 3.5 if you want more speed.

This ^, and if you want to use that revision and have a higher fps try overclocking your CPU.

guys i already wrote that im using 3.5 along to that build i mentioned. and nope, overclocking is too risky. instead i already told in the post that i was able to emulate very well with my previous cpu which was 2.6 ghz. almost half of my current system overall.

Quote:last year i was getting pretty good performance regardless of little bit graphical detail reduction with Athlon 64 x2 at 2.6 GHz and Radeon HD3650 512mb, 2gb of ram. Now i have Phenom II x4 3.4 ghz and HD7950, but cannot get a speed over 40-45 fps with same games

I don't know how you could get "good performance" with an Athlon CPU last year....I guess you only play light-weight games
Depending on the game , some demanding games require i5 3570k @ 4.5GHz or higher
A Phenom II x4 3.4GHz is a low-mid range CPU for Dolphin by today standard
A decent CPU for Dolphin is i5 4670k or equivalent CPU
You should take a look at Dolphin Zelda WW benchmark - light weight game :
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-th...-benchmark

(08-10-2013, 10:13 AM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:last year i was getting pretty good performance regardless of little bit graphical detail reduction with Athlon 64 x2 at 2.6 GHz and Radeon HD3650 512mb, 2gb of ram. Now i have Phenom II x4 3.4 ghz and HD7950, but cannot get a speed over 40-45 fps with same games

I don't know how you could get "good performance" with an Athlon CPU last year....I guess you only play light-weight games
Depending on the game , some demanding games require i5 3570k @ 4.5GHz or higher
A Phenom II x4 3.4GHz is a low-mid range CPU for Dolphin by today standard
A decent CPU for Dolphin is i5 4670k or equivalent CPU
You should take a look at Dolphin Zelda WW benchmark - light weight game :
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-th...-benchmark

hmm interesting. i wonder which game could want that much power to run ^^

i honestly dont remember if i did anything special for it. might be used frameskip or more tricks. was playing virtua striker 2002 (with few glitches), burnout (was quite slow as i remember) and soulcalibur II(almost perfect) but these performances were good for my view, still same games up today.

edit: game infos

Quote:i wonder which game could want that much power to run

Zelda TP + EFB copies to Ram + LLE Audio (In Hyrule Field - later part) , The Last Story (from the moment you enter Lazulis/Ruli city) , Pokémon Battle Revolution +LLE audio ....

Hayvan Wrote:and nope, overclocking is too risky

I feel sorry for people with this mindset. They remind me of the people who refuse to upgrade their ram because they're afraid that they'll break their PC if they open it. Sure it COULD happen. But all evidence would suggest that unless you have absolutely no idea what you're doing nothing is going to go wrong. Thus your fear is irrational and instead based on your lack of experience with the content.

Do your research first and you'll be fine. CPU overclocking has been extremely common for the last decade. So much so that most motherboards are marketed towards it these days and have built in features to help. It's also the reason that most home built PCs have aftermarket coolers. Hundreds of thousands or millions of people have done this. I would imagine that the failure rate is below 0.1%. Destroying a CPU from normal overclocking is so rare that it's almost unheard of. Usually in the rare event that someone does manage to damage their hardware this way it's because they didn't do their do their research and did something stupid that could have easily been avoided. And of course competitive overclocking where they deliberately do stupid things to their hardware just to see how high it will go before it dies.

You have no good reason to not try it. It's free performance if it works. And you lose nothing if it doesn't (just reset your bios).