Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey there!

I'm new to Dolphin and emulation in general. I'm not looking for REALLY great visuals, I just want my games to run at their intended framerate (or at least in the range of 2-3 frames off).

The only games I really have played so far are Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Mario Kart Double Dash. Both of these games are intended to be at 60 fps. However, I'm running into frequent frame drop issues. Double Dash runs somewhere between 50-57 on Mushroom cup, but gets worse on flower and star. Melee runs good on most stages 1v1, but any attempt at 3-4 players or Fountain of Dreams, and I lose frames considerably. Is there an easy way JUST to get a solid framerate? The graphics themselves don't matter as much to me. Is this due to my computer specs? Should this be in the support threads? Haha.

AMD Athlon X4 760K Quad Core CPU (3.80 GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
8GB RAM
Dolphin 5.0
No Overclocks

EDIT: I'm not receiving graphical errors, like warped textures.

Your CPU is not fast enough. Try overclocking or getting a new Intel CPU (AMD CPUs have really slow single threaded performance compared to INtel CPUs)

You need to upgrade your CPU. It's fine for lightweight games, as you have seen yourself, but as soon as it gets more demanding, you will suffer from poor performance.
Any recent Intel CPU (Haswell or newer) will be *much* better than AMD CPUs.

Alternatively, if you don't want to upgrade, you can try overclocking. It could help a little.

(07-07-2016, 03:40 AM)leolam Wrote: [ -> ]You need to upgrade your CPU. It's fine for lightweight games, as you have seen yourself, but as soon as it gets more demanding, you will suffer from poor performance.
Any recent Intel CPU (Haswell or newer) will be *much* better than AMD CPUs.

Alternatively, if you don't want to upgrade, you can try overclocking. It could help a little.

(07-07-2016, 03:39 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Your CPU is not fast enough. Try overclocking or getting a new Intel CPU (AMD CPUs have really slow single threaded performance compared to INtel CPUs)

Unfortunately, my motherboard does not support Intel CPU's... I'll try an overclock. Are all AMD CPU's bad for Dolphin? Any good AMD CPU's???

Yeah, you would need to get a new motherboard.

Pretty much. Dolphin needs fast single core speeds, which Intel focused on. AMD said otherwise, thinking people didn't want faster cores, just more of them.

(07-07-2016, 04:39 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Yeah, you would need to get a new motherboard.

Pretty much. Dolphin needs fast single core speeds, which Intel focused on. AMD said otherwise, thinking people didn't want faster cores, just more of them.

In that case, I'll try to get a water cooler or after-market air cooler for my CPU and overclock as much as I can.

Any hacks that would help?

Hacks no. Just keep Dolphin up to date, as the individual game .ini files load the optimized settings.

The Hyper 212 Evo is always a good choice.

If you're feeling daring, you could even try reducing the "CPU clock override" setting in Dolphin.


Also, just to clarify, Intel CPUs do not fit onto AMD mobos and vice-versa. For exactly the last 10 years AMD CPUs have been behind Intel CPUs in single-threaded performance with the gap increasing over the years - this gap will not even have a chance of being reduced until Zen is released in Q4 this year, but even then it'd still require a new motherboard.

(07-07-2016, 03:39 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Your CPU is not fast enough. Try overclocking or getting a new Intel CPU (AMD CPUs have really slow single threaded performance compared to INtel CPUs)

I don't know if I should be responding to my old thread but I would just like to know. Is the i5 6600k good for Dolphin?

Of course.