What would be the best software to record Dolphin Gameplay with no frame rate drops?
You can use Dolphin's built-in frame dump utility, even if your framerate drops while emulating games, the output file will still be at full speed. However, you'll need to dump audio separately and then merge the two files into a new one, and as far as I remember, some games make the dumped frames/audio go out of sync...
I seem to be getting a lot of lag using any software. What do most people use?
Since you can't use Shadowplay use Intel Quicksync (the AMD alternative is/was pretty bad). Use any software that allows you to use custom codecs such as Afterburner or DXTory.
Shadowplay can be used to record dolphin. Set it to record desktop and then put dolphin in fullscreen and BAM.
Amon1995 uses AMD GPU, Shadow Play is not an option...
Do those other programs capture screen output, or do they have special DirectX capture functionality?
Open Broadcaster Software supports Intel iGPU Quick Sync for encoding without loading CPU. Not sure how it plays with an external AMD GPU.
As far as I can tell, it does not capture from buffer and has the screen grabbing overhead. So it won't work as well.
I seem to be getting problems with all of those, they all have a huge amount of stuttering and FPS drops.
When I use MSI Afterburner, the FPS seems to drop to 30, even though I've set it to 60 in the settings. Anyone else had this problem?
Why not just use the dump frames & audio options in Dolphin? If you want to play it without any lag too, play it while recording the inputs to tas file then replay the tas while dumping frames & audio. This is great 'cause it means you can play your game in 720p or whatever then dump it later in 1080p, 2K, 4K, 8K, you name it!
However, I have been having an issue with a 13 minute limit on the audio so be wary of it.
(see post here:
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-how-to-dump-more-than-13-minutes)