Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi everybody,

My computers specs are

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012)
El Capitan 10.11.6
2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3  ram
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB

playing on the newest dev build of dolphin as of today.

Playing through Xenoblade, i am noticing that after playing for about 10 minutes my framerate starts steadily dropping until it sits at about half of what it should be.  When i jump into the game, it runs at 100% (or higher if i unlock the framerate) but after a while it slumps until its a stuttery mess.

Is this purely because my hardware is unfit for this game?
Any mac users have any tips about settings for this game?

It's your device's thermal profile. The performance drop is because your device heats up extremely rapidly and throttles clock speeds to keep temperatures stable. Seeing as your laptop is over 4 years old I doubt you have any valid warranty. So I would recommend researching and acquiring high end thermal paste and look up a guide to opening the MacBook and applying the thermal paste. Those initial retina macbook's have awful thermal paste and just applying a better coat should improve things

surprisingly i actually do have a valid warranty, because i bought this computer refurbished. Do you think this performance drop is a valid concern to raise to the apple people?

No.

Apple systems aren't great for Dolphin anyways. Not much you can do beyond booting it in windows, hope for better performance, and maybe make sure you can get some proper ventilation.

Just replace your laptop's thermal paste with sth like Arctic MX-4 or IC Diamond 7 . OEM thermal paste is much worse than aftermarket one , OEM thermal paste die quickly within a year .

OSX is also much slower than Windows 10 x64 . On Windows 10 x64, you can use Directx 12 which is the fastest backend right now . You will need Boot Camp though

If you want to stick with OSX , it's fine but you must install gfxcardstatus and choose discrete only . If you don' t do this , Dolphin will use integrated GPU which is Intel HD and you will lose performance . On Windows , you also have to do the same , not with gfxcardstatus but Nvidia Control Panel . Again , you must check the CPU temperature while running Dolphin (10 mins or so), if your CPU or GPU throttle , you won't have good performance

as per gfxcardstatus, i don't think you actually have to do that, as you can set your main graphics card to default under power save settings.

anyway, curse this laptop, im definitely going to complain to apple that i can't use programs that my machine meets the requirements for.

Btw , your CPU must run at turbo mode . I bet your CPU is i7 3615QM
According to notebookcheck , your CPU can go up to 3.2GHz (2 cores mode)
On windows, you can control CPU speed with Throttestop but...
Anyway , the default clock 2.3GHz is too slow for most games

Complain to them that it overheats and your performance goes down, they may actually do something.