Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I have a laptop with the following specs.

Ivy Bridge i7 2.4GHz Turbo 3.2
8GB RAM
Nvidia 630M graphics

That's the basics anyway

So heres the problem.... I go into the NVidia control panel and I set dolphin to use the dedicated graphics chip. Under power I chose "Prefer maximum performance." When I open dolphin it shows the Graphics adapter as the Nvidia chip. Then I click play and the game loads. As soon as the window pops up for the game, I go into dolphin graphics settings again and now it shows Intel HD 4000 Graphics. It switches back to the intel graphics as soon as I load a game. Why is that?

Secondly, running dolphin I am getting 70% speed on super Mario sunshine, with HLE sound. All other settings are default except for window size which is set to "Auto - Window Size. With a 32gig ive bridge and a dedicated NVidia chip there no excuse for SMS to run that slow. SMS is not demanding. Ive run SMS on PCs with lower specs. Why is it only running 70%?

Running dolphin 4.0-1222. CPU-Z shows 3200MHz when playing SMS.

Can anyone tell me why its going so slow?

The drop down in Dolphin is not accurate. If you set it (and saved it) under Nvidia control panel and it showed up when a game loaded, it's using the dedicated card.

Don't set the IR to Auto window size. Set it to like 2x IR

I set it to 2x and it still around around 70ish. The specs of this laptop should do a lot better than that

Switch over to the D3D backend. Dev build 4.0-1192 added an accuracy enhancement that fixed many games, but OpenGL took a hit in performance on Nvidia cards. D3D is affected much less.

Your computer is good in dolphin, but not spectacular. Haswell CPUs are better by about 30% than Ivy bridge, clock for clock, in Dolphin. Still, SMS shouldn't be giving you issues. Make sure you're set to high performance under Windows power management and that your laptop is plugged

I am on D3D. I left it at that. On the old versions of dolpin you could choose between d3d9 or 11. 11 was slower than 9. What is d3d now? I kniw my laptop isnt top notch but ive ran sms on a lot of PCs and I know its not very demanding

D3d is 11 only. 9 was dropped to allow for more accuracy and speed in 11 and OpenGL.

Well theres your problem right there. 9 worked with no issues for me. How do I get 9 back

Use an old, inaccurate, buggy and generally undesirable build such as 4.0.2 which still has D3D9.

Ive always used D3D 9 and have NEVER had an issue. All the games I play work with D3D9 just fine. They are perfectly accurate and they don't have any issues. Get D3D11 going at proper speed and ill switch back. For now Im playing on D3D9. Sheesh no wonder it was so slow

Read the article on the frontpage of the site for more information why D3D9 was dropped.

Edit: You do realize Mario Sunshine is one of the games that have had various problems with D3D9 over the years due to it's weaknesses? The article has two examples from this game alone. No problems at all has a strange definition with you.