Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey all,

I recently got a new PC to replace my aging rig from a few years ago. So far, all has been well and it's been running everything I've thrown at it.. except for emulation. GameCube games seem to run great, even in 4K. However, Wii games slow to a crawl almost immediately. An example is Super Mario Galaxy 2, which is my favorite game of all time. I first tried running it in 4K, but the frame rate would only go up to about 45-50FPS. I thought this odd as I've seen lesser hardware max out this game before at 4K. However, I decided to try something different and lowered the resolution to 1080p. The frame rate was exactly the same as before. This was really strange, as my old PC ran Super Mario Galaxy 2 fine at 1080p. I then tried Native Wii resolution.. same frame rate. Next, I tried Mario Kart Wii, and it too couldn't achieve 60FPS.

It's not just Dolphin exhibiting this behavior, PCSX2 and PPSSPP are also lagging quite badly. However, games are running fine. My 3DMark score is on point, temps are in check. No throttling on either the CPU or GPU.

Help would be greatly appreciated, as Dolphin is one of the things I run on my PC most. My specs will are listed below.

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 480
RAM: 16GB A-Data DDR4
Motherboard: ASUS Z170 Gaming Pro

Using the latest Dev Version of Dolphin 5.0

Are you using OpenGL or D3D? The AMD OpenGL drivers aren't that fast, and we default to OpenGL. So maybe you should try D3D instead.

(08-09-2016, 09:01 PM)degasus Wrote: [ -> ]Are you using OpenGL or D3D? The AMD OpenGL drivers aren't that fast, and we default to OpenGL. So maybe you should try D3D instead.

Forgot to specify the backend I was using, which was Direct3D12. Since Direct3D12 is still experimental, I also gave Direct3D11 a go. Same result, it's like my PC hates emulation or something :/

Your PC should be by far good enough to play dolphin well. Just a few stutters on compiling shaders.

The only thing I can think of is to check and make sure your CPU and GPU are not running at low clock speeds for some reason.

I just downloaded the Dolphin 5.0 Stable build to see if anything changed, and to my surprise everything works as normal again. This leads me to believe that a change in one of the Development builds caused performance to drop significantly, and a recent one at that (as I'm usually up to date on Development builds). I'll try to test some other Development builds, to see if I can find and isolate out the build that is causing the problems.

More likely your GPU driver or something wasn't detecting that it needed to be in high performance mode when running the dev build of Dolphin.

(08-13-2016, 03:16 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]More likely your GPU driver or something wasn't detecting that it needed to be in high performance mode when running the dev build of Dolphin.

How is this possible? Yesterday i checked the clock Speed with gpu-z and i Wonder why the values are so low. I will try to post a Screenshot later.

I have the Same stutter problems with latest dev builds. My rig:
i7-3770
GTX 680MX
8 GB RAM
Windows 10 x64 1607

I check later the stable build.

Please do post the screenshot of the slow Dolphin build and whatever build Dolphin is running fast in.
My guess is Dolphin changed something where the GPU driver is mistakenly not seeing Dolphin as needing full speed all the time and is not going into full speed mode or whatever it's called. Make sure you have a high performance profile for Dolphin in the Nvidia Control Panel.