I was trying to run Wind Waker on default settings, and ended up with frequent drops to about 20fps (~66%). My CPU (Intel Core i5 3330) was running at 2.97 gHz with Intel HD Graphics. I know I can mess around with the settings, but from what I've tried, all setting modifications have resulted in identical performances.
I don't plan on overclocking and I don't plan on upgrading my CPU right now, though, from what I understand, my PC should be able to run it at playable speeds/full speed. Is there anything I can do to improve my performance with the PC I have?
What build are you using? I think you should update to the latest development builds if you haven't, you won't regret it.
CPU: Intel Core i5 3330 @ 3.0 gHz
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 2500
RAM: Generic 8GB DDR3
I actually tried using Dolphin 3.0 (I've heard it's less demanding), and that seemed to help, I'm getting full speed for around the beginning of the game versus the speeds I was getting mentioned in the OP, so that's good I guess.
It´s less demanding because it´s more buggy. Actual builds are a lot faster than that one.
No, it's not less demanding.
Newest builds are fastest now.
That actually depends on the instructions your PC uses.
e.g. a Core 2 Duo won't see any speedups but a Haswell surely will. I think this applies to Ivy Bridge too.
What? I'm using Athlon II and I see speedups. That's the same age as Core 2 Duo.
No idea why this happens, but I'm pretty sure Core 2 X's do not see any speedups. Might be that the Athlon 2 supports instructions the Core 2's don't.
That probably isn't so. Well, actually, they do support some historical instruction sets from AMD that I don't think would be very helpful to dolphin, but that's it.
The new builds are more optimized even for older CPUs. It's just better code. Sure, Haswell PCs have a few paths they can take that older PCs can't, but, the code the older computers take are also optimized better.