Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Real HArdware has no concept of a shader cache; GX can be configured to do a bunch of things. For each way it's configured, we need a shader for our GPUs to be able to understand it.

Ah, so it's part of the process for translating the GC graphics into a format usable by PC hardware. Thanks.

The real Gamecube hardware is fixed function, a specific pre-set pipeline with lots of configurable options. PC hardware is programmable (it can do almost anything you can program a shader for), but it has to compile the shaders into code that runs on the GPU.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. Adding the Dolphin profile to the Nvidia control panel helped a lot. I still get some stutter in Sonic Colours, especially the first time I play a level but it seems much better now. Stuttering on the title screen of Geometery Wars is gone completely.

Really amazed at how good Sonic Colours looks, I bought the game over a year ago but never got around to trying it on my real Wii.

Just wanted to share that I've managed to reduce stuttering further, by copying the dumped disc image from my data drive to my SSD. I had just assumed a regular hard drive would be much faster than an optical drive but it really does seem that running the disk image from the SSD has made a big improvement.