Okay these are my specs
8 GB DDR3 ram
AMD Radeon R7 260X 2GB DDR5
AMD FX6350 6 cores @ 4GHZ each
1TB hard drive
I try running sonic unleashed and I'm getting 22 fps with these settings
DX11 back end
2x internal resolution
No antialiasing
OpenMP cache enabled
Everything else is default.
What's the deal? I think my specs are more than enough to run dolphin at max.
Uh, no. That ain´t enough for max settings (the CPU is killing you). OpenMP does little improvement so most of the time is useless.
Anyway, make sure both CPU and GPU aren´t throttling.
I don't need the best visuals but I want decent performance and I can't even get that with my current setting (they're not high at all). How do I make sure they aren't throttling?
Tell us which games you're trying to play first of all. For Dolphin, an AMD FX6350 is not all that great, even when OC'ed to 4.0 GHz depending on what game you're running. Some games don't need a lot from the CPU, others do, however.
With a CPU bottleneck, keep in mind that you can't just sacrifice graphical fidelity (which depends on the GPU in Dolphin) and get a speed boost (because the component responsible for graphical fidelity isn't the same component slowing down emulation in that case). It's easy enough to check if you have a CPU bottleneck. Just set your Internal Resolution to 1x and disable all AA. If you still get slowdowns while the GPU is doing minimal work, you have yourself a CPU bottleneck.
The most obvious cures for a CPU bottleneck is to OC (even further in your case) or simply buy a better CPU. Unfortunately, AMD lags behind Intel in single-threaded IPC (which Dolphin relies a lot on for CPU-based performance) and the situation doesn't realistically look to change any time soon. We've done several benchmarks showing the gap between AMD and Intel products if you're interested. Having said that, you still have some room to OC your CPU (which again, may be enough depending on the games you're looking to play, if they aren't terribly demanding in Dolphin) and failing that, even basic Haswell hardware like the i5-4130 can run circles around an AMD FX6350 (and even beats OC'ed 2500Ks and 3570Ks in Dolphin).
Run Gpu-z and Cpu-z while playing a game in dolphin to ensure that your processor and GPU MHz is increasing to its maximum (for power efficiency, these are almost always throttled when the computer is idle).
Quote:I think my specs are more than enough to run dolphin at max
Not even close . Dolphin is a dual core app and your CPU is bad at single threaded performance
Even FX-8350 @ 5.0GHz is still slower than i3 4130 @ 3.4GHz in
Dolphin Benchmark
Sonic Unleashed is a demanding game which tax CPU raw power by alot