Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

To start off, here are my specs:

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
AMD FX 8150 3.6GHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti
8gb RAM
Dolphin 4.0.1

So here's the issue, pretty much every game I run has huge frame rate drops/lag at some point. The first game I tried was MGS: Twin Snakes. I realize this game has some issues and is difficult to get working correctly, so I wasn't too upset when it didn't work. But then I tried SSB Brawl. After messing with some settings, the game ran fine through the opening and the menu, till I got to actual gameplay and then it just slowed down to a crawl. I tried Melee, same thing. Finally I tried Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Which ran fine up until I beat the 2nd dungeon and then the game slowed to the point of being unplayable. Based on everything I read my hardware is more than enough to run any of these at full speed and even with some enhancements, so I'm at a loss as to why I'm getting these issues. any ideas?

If i remember correctly the AMD FX 8150 has a very low IPC count, so that might be the problem. im not entirely sure though, correct me if i am wrong! lol

Yes, AMD FX CPUs have low single-threaded IPC counts in comparison to Intel's last few hardware generations. That's what Dolphin really counts on. Even with that, that CPU shouldn't have issues with Melee or Brawl. 4.0.1 is old and actually slower than the very latest development builds. The OP is encouraged to use the latest builds (4.0-19XX). Some games will require overclocking on that FX CPU though, since it's not well suited for the workloads Dolphin throws at it.

Dolphin is a dual core application . AMD FX CPUs are only good at multi-threaded performance ...
Even an OCed Pile driver FX-8350 @ 5.0GHz (madness) can not beat i3 4130 @ 3.4GHz in Dolphin Benchmark

Does Dolphin take a performance hit on FX CPUs? I assume it does well with the latest Intel quad and hexa core CPUs? (yes it only uses 3 threads max, i know)

Technically yes, the FX series is good for multi-threaded applications only, there still is that single core but nowhere near as much as Intel processors. with the FX chips, you'll see a big difference fps wise in certain games.