Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I had hoped to be able to alleviate this issue on my own, without needing to bother any of you folks with my problems, but I really am sort of at ends, here.

I'm not one for Wiimotes, they just don't feel comfortable in my hands- a sort of disconnected feeling too difficult to grasp on a spacial level. So, learning that Dolphin supports mapping Wiimote controls to a sensible gamepad, I set about getting my copy of Super Mario Galaxy working on my PC.

Much to my dismay, however, anything beyond the title screen results in a dip to about 26 FPS on average, which slows the game to an intolerable level. Poking about the forums for two days led me to find that, by all accounts, I should be fine! Yet the problems persist, heedless to my tinkering.

I fear that my CPU might be bottlenecking the speed, which wouldn't be entirely unexpected, and simply fuel for an upgrade- but I want to be certain I haven't made some grievous error. I'll check back frequently to answer any questions posed that could contribute to the solution.

Specs:
Windows 7 x64
Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 GHz
nVIDIA GTX 570
10 GB RAM
Dolphin 4.0
Direct3D11 Backend
1x Native IR
0 Anti-Aliasing
1x Anisotropic Filtering
>Enable Dual Core
>Enable Idle Skipping
>JIT Recompiler
>DSP HLE emulation
>OpenAL Audio Backend

Use OpenGL, Mario Galaxy doesn't like D3D11 at all, and your Nvidia + Vertex Streaming Hack will lend you much, much more speed.

And yes, your CPU is the bottleneck, but a more efficient GPU backend uses less CPU. Hopefully this can make it a bit more playable for you.

That-
Did beautifully. Occasionally I drop to 45 or so, but that's initial level loading and that's definitely more playable than 30. I very very much appreciate the quick response, as much as I like to find myself patient and fix problems without inconveniencing others, I just-
Well, sometimes innocuous things like this slip me by.

I'll look into, sometime later, a new CPU. I knew going into this that a first-gen i7 and a 'beta' Motherboard were desperately in need of upgrading.

Again, thank you so much for your time.

Yeah, once you upgrade to a newer i5 or i7, you won't drop below 60 at all with the rest of your PC being so well put together. Latest Development builds are actually a little bit faster than 4.0 as well, so you may find some better luck there too.

By the way, with a GPU like that, feel free to crank up the internal res and anti-aliasing a bit; it makes the game look absolutely jawdropping.

Your cpu is too slow. Upgrade and overclock. SMG is one of the most demanding games to emulate in the entire Wii library.

Edit: Damnit I forgot to refresh.