I have a very decently built pc so I thought i would be able to play gamecube games easily. I load up crash bandicoot and it runs very choppy no matter what settings or version of dolphin. Then I tried ty and that ran at a crawl of 15 fps. I've seen people run these games on potatoes just fine but why cant I seem to get it?
Post your own potato then and what settings you are trying to play the games with.
It should run at it's best right out of the box without fiddling with any settings. If it doesn't, it's because of weak cpu for emulation* (in most cases).
*emulation in any matter is very cpu-heavy and mostly one or dual-core performance only.
> AMD FX™-8350 Eight-Core Processor
No, this isn't a good processor for emulation. For dolphin, only single core performance matters. And AMD CPUs are really bad for dolphin.
What degasus said.
And since you're already using the latest development release which is much more efficient on the CPU, there's not much you can do besides overclocking.
But! Overclocking will help you a ton. Apparently those chips can reach really high overclocks to sorta make up for their crappy cores (and match a low end core i3 apparently). You'll just need super good cooling, as they already have really high TDPs and you're just going to be pushing it further.
And it's not so much that Dolphin is unoptimized for AMD, it's that emulation in general requires very high single threaded performance. Intel does really well at this. AMD falls flat on their face.
Crash Bandicoot is also a game that runs at 60/60 in Dolphin but 30/60 on console. You can make it much easier to run by lowering the Emulated CPU clock rate in Options/Configure/Advanced. But you lose the game running at 60 FPS.