Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello to all, this is my first post.

I just got into Dolphin and it's been awhile since I last fiddled with emulators.

I am running versions 3.0 and 4.0 on a notebook I bought in 2010 with Windows 7 - 32 bits, 3GB of RAM. My video card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series, from AMD. I seemingly have two AMD Turion II P540 Dual-Core Processors.

I am trying to run a number of different GameCube games on both the 3.0 and 4.0 versions of Dolphin and they are extremely slow, taking dives to as low as less than 10 FPS at most times. I tried checking some tutorials online to see if I could fix it by better configuring the emulator, but apparently everything is fine and up to date.

If I try versions lower than 4.0, I also experience bugs like the background music disappearing and some polygon glitches. On version 4.0 everything is great, minus the speed the games run at.

One thing that strongly caught my attention and is making me think there are no problems with the emulators or configuration, and the only cause of the slowness is my computer being too old, is that when I close both versions of Dolphin my notebook continues to respond very slowly to tasks taken online or simply by browsing through its folders. Many years ago, when I had an old PC, I have experienced a very similar issue when I tried to run GBA and N64 emulators, and then all it took me to make everything run smooth was to buy a new machine.

So, perhaps I am to do the very same now? Or perhaps simply by altering the configuration or downloading a more appropriate revision of Dolphin for my machine will do the trick?

Thank you very much!

From the IRC chat, your CPU is very old, so you would need to upgrade.
Also, the dev builds are usually faster than 4.0 (lastest stable)

Indeed, your CPU is way too old for Dolphin, and as it is an AMD CPU, it has weak performance as far as Dolphin is concerned.

It's a notebook that was a potato even back in 2010. He can't upgrade it.

Yeah, like the previous replies, your computer is not nearly powerful enough to run Dolphin at full speed. Your hardware is also not recommended at all.

First of all, thanks for the replies.

I had figured it was probably something to my computer being old.

I plan to buy a new notebook this coming year. I can't buy a desktop due to lack of space. Any notebook models or specifications I should keep in mind to properly run Dolphin?

Thanks.

Dolphin cares about a good CPU. The GPU is mostly for turning up internal resolution above 1.5x or 2x and some games that do weird things to the EFB. So the better CPU you get, the better Dolphin will run. Avoid AMD CPUs. They have low IPC and require a much higher clock speed to match a low end intel CPU

And it's a bit of a trap with laptop CPUs, because Intel CPUs ending in "U" are Ultra Low Voltage CPUs, and aren't very good for Dolphin.

The Notebook should at least run a i7 4720HQ up to i7 5700hq or i7 6700hq.

Thanks! It may be a while until I can afford a good notebook (maybe about one year) but I am sure to keep those recommendations in mind, even though the scenario may change with time.

Hello, all.

I just got a MacBook and downloaded the corresponding Dolphin 4.0 version. It was a gift so I couldn't aim for specs that would benefit Dolphin. Well... Most games are running better, and now are at least playable. But they are still far from running perfectly when it comes to frame rate. As I am new to Mac, I am still getting used to understanding the OS and the machine itself, but I understand the info bellow may be relevant:

- Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5;
- Memory: 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB

Is this enough info to know if the specs are good enough? Shall I look into optmizing the Dolphin configuration itself?

Thank you very much.