Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Quote:I have it on a cooling stand

Cooling pad is snake oil

Quote: Overheating might be a factor, but I don't think that's the main culprit

It is . 90% non-gaming laptop overheats with Dolphin
Don't underestimate Dolphin , it's even crazier than Prime95 torture test
If your laptop hit critical temp , your laptop components will throttle and melt slowly (especially the GPU)
https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#my-laptop-new-gpu-not-performing-well-it-should

Just to add that I have exactly the same processor and both Paper Mario TTYD and Super Paper Mario run full speed 99% of the time, so, you are getting overheat and that's what is throttling your CPU back, causing slowdowns. With proper cooling it runs at 3.2GHz, more than enough for Paper Mario series...

And that's not even minimum, I have a far weaker processor and I have no problems with either of the Paper Mario games.