Win 7 Pro SP1 x64
Core i5 650 3.20 GHz
4 GB RAM
GTX 260
I have tried 4.0 stable up to dolphin-master-4.0-107-x64 and no matter what video backend I use or what options I try, Melee stutters (for video & audio at the same time).
I have been testing this in Super Smash Bros Melee because I hear it is supposed to run pretty well for people with worse specs than I have. I watch my CPU, RAM, and GPU loads and none have ever broken 80%, usually far under 70%. So what is the secret?
I recorded this (audio muted) video clip to show what I mean
http://youtu.be/9brt3991PTo
Set your Internal Resolution to 1x and turn off AA. If you still get slowdowns, this indicates a CPU bottleneck. If not, gradually increase your Internal Resolution (and AA optionally) until you get slowdowns (so you'll know how much your GPU can handle before it becomes the bottleneck).
Most people haven't reported using this game on 4.0 and above. Simply because someone could run this well with similar specs on 3.0 or 3.5 doesn't mean you can do the same with 4.0. A lot of changes have taken place, and older revisions generally tend to be less demanding than the latest ones (although not always in every regard). The point is that version differences can explain a lot as to why someone you've seen can run something and you can't, even when the hardware is similar.
1) Just to make sure I'm working with recommended settings, I went to C:\Users\someguy1985\Documents and deleted the 'Dolphin Emulator' directory to run from a clean slate and then fired off 4.0 stable.
2) I change the video backend to OpenGL for best video performance as per
Dolphin's blog (in my trials OpenGL seems to be the best too).
3) The clean defaults are Internal Resolution to 1x Native and AA to None like you recommended so I don't change anything here.
4) I launch hardware monitoring tools
5) I still get the poor performance I mentioned at the start of this thread. Here is an image of my hardware load
http://i.imgur.com/pqcSi2l.png from playing Melee from the 'Press Start' title screen through fighting and killing an opponent in a match. Notice how the GPU load % value only peaks once around when I pass the title screen and CPU never hits 100%.
As I see it, either Dolphin is not fully utilizing my hardware or Dolphin is configured wrong? Any more ideas?
Dolphin won't utilize your hardware 100% because it's not designed to. You have 4 logical cores, but Dolphin is a dual-core app primarily (it can use a third for emulating the DSP when using LLE audio, but LLE audio is more demanding than HLE audio, even with this option). With your CPU, you won't see utilization hitting 100%. There are reasons as to why Dolphin can't use any more major threads for the majority of its processing; you can read about it here if you're interested:
https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldn...-go-faster
As I said, if you get slowdowns with IR set to 1x and AA disabled, you have a CPU bottleneck and your CPU is too slow to run Dolphin at fullspeed. Your options are to either upgrade your hardware, or use an older, unsupported Dolphin build. While 4.0 and above are the only supported versions, nothing is stopping you from using older revisions. We really do not recommend using old builds due to various issues they have, and you won't get any help with older builds on the forums here.