Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi all,

For most programs in OS X Mavericks, they only run at full capacity when they are in focus. If you click out of most games, for example, the FPS drops drastically as the enter a power saving mode.

For some reason, Dolphin doesn't seem to tell the OS when it's in focus. The game seems to constantly be in that low power state, whether it's in focus or not. I believe this is the cause of why I am getting low FPS in even relatively simple games like Wind Waker.

For the record, my computer is a MacBook Pro with:
256GB SATA3 SSD
8GB DDR3 RAM
i7-3536QM (2.4GHz boost to 3.4GHz)
NVIDIA 640M

Any help would be appreciated.

Wind Waker defaults to DSP LLE on 4.0, which is a highly CPU-intensive setting. Try HLE on a current dev build of Dolphin, where the issue that made it default to LLE has been fixed and a metric fuckton of other speedups have been added too.

If, after that, the game still runs slowly for you, try the crazy-ass fix detailed here: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-ga...m-settings && http://www.chromescreen.com/get-rid-of-o...ull-speed/ If you don't wanna try it, that's fine, but at least have gfxCardStatus installed so it tells you which GPU you're using with Dolphin.

Either way, I doubt it's an issue with focus (I mean, the GL window's visible and in the goddamn foreground) as much as it is Dolphin generally being slow as fuck for various hidden (but legitimate) reasons.