Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Oh hey, what's going down? Apologies if this has been asked before (and I suspect it has) but I've recently installed Dolphin 4.0.2 and I'm having trouble with the speed at which it runs some games. I've only tried one GameCube game so far (Burnout) which ran fine and I haven't tried any proper Wii games; I mainly got it to play (and review on my blog) WiiWare games, but most of the ones I've tried so far don't run properly.

Gradius Rebirth works okay but most others I've tried, such as FAST Racing, Bomberman Blast, and Rainbow Islands run much slower than they should and with very juddery sound. I've tried messing with the various settings - some options make the problem worse but none get rid of it. I turned on the FPS display which (with FAST Racing) shows 60fps on the company logo and menu screens but slows to about 24fps when the actual game starts. Is there any way to lock the FPS at 60?

Does anyone have any ideas on how I might solve this problem, or is my laptop simply not up to the job? Its specs are:

HP Pavilion, running on Windows 8.1 (64-bit) with 8GB RAM
CPU is an AMD A8-4555M APU with Radeon HD graphics, running at 1.6Ghz

Thanks for any help or suggestions

It means that your system can't emulate the game fast enough.

Emulation has to be synchronous.

If your CPU isn't fast enough, it will lag.

If your GPU isn't fast enough, it will lag.

Emulation is very CPU heavy. You have a very weak CPU. Fortunately Radeon Graphics aren't all that bad in those weak APUs, better than Intel GPUs.

Try the latest Development release and set the Graphics backend to Direct3D. We're much more efficient with CPU in the latest dev releases, heavier on the GPU due to accuracy improvements. But, since you have an APU, that works out fine for you. 4.0.2 is incredibly old and incredibly bad.

Also, if you upgrade to Windows 10, you can use our Direct3D 12 backend which is much less taxing on your very weak CPU.

As for framerates, you cannot make every game run at 60. It needs to run at whatever the game was designed to run at. If your speed/frame limit is set to auto, that's all you need. Dolphin will take care of the rest. Some games change framerates depending on the part of the game.

Hi, thanks for the quick reply and helpful advice I actually tried the latest version of Dolphin I could find (4.0-9198) to begin with but, when that had the problem I explained, I looked for help online. I found a YouTube video of someone running FAST Racing at full speed and the video said it was running on 4.0.2 so I switched to that.

Anyway, I've now gone back to the latest version and switched the graphics thingy to Direct3D as you suggested and it seems to be okay. So thanks a lot!

p.s I tried Windows 10 a while back but it was thrashing the crap out of my HD and CPU so I had to go back to 8.1

Windows 10's initial HDD/CPU thrashing is generally a first time update install + indexing doing things. Did it last for more than a couple of hours?

It lasted for the whole 2-3 weeks I had it installed. I looked online and found out about lots of things I can turn off and I even got rid of my anti-virus but it was still doing it... I don't like Windows 8 but least I can actually do stuff

Oh holy crap. That sucks!

Yeah, Windows 8 is sorta meh until I install Classic Start. After that I can't really tell the difference between 7 and 8. Having a proper start menu is nice.

Yeah, I could cope with Windows 8 too, if it weren't for the fact that it messed up some of my emulators (which are essential for my blog). It's really made MAME a pain in the arse to use (I had an old version which was wonderful - worked with everything - but it's all glitchy on W8) and a couple of others too. Oh well