I remember in the recent past, it was necessary to set my nvidia drivers to maximum performance as opposed to adaptive to get the best performance out of Dolphin. Is doing that still necessary as it makes my GPU work 100% at all times rather than only when required?
You can do it per program. Just do it for Dolphin anyways.
Is this something that could potentially be fixed in the future? I've never seen a program require this sort of thing.
Not on our end. Dolphin's workload on the GPU is odd and the driver's heuristics are not very good at detecting it and think it's a minimal workload, so it powers down to save power.