Most games run pretty well for me, but none perfect. Normally, I wouldn't even bother posting about this but I think there may be some way to speed it up. The problem is that in more complex scenes, and battles games slow down significantly, down to about 20-30 fps at worst. This wouldn't be an issue normally since I have a really bad Intel Chipset graphics card that isn't good for Dolphin, so I'm used to these issues. The thing that troubles me is that Dolphin isn't using even half of my CPU cycles. Before the Direct3d plugin was fixed, Dolphin used up all my CPU. This leads me to believe there is a way to speed up these games. I'm not really sure how Dolphin works, but my guess would be that its running on the memory in my graphics card, rather than my CPU. I have 4Gig's of RAM, which is much more memory than my graphics card has. If this is the case, is there any option to change this?
your gpu can't render all the frames that your cpu is putting out. Buy a new graphics card. A way to test to see how fast your cpu would go with a good graphics card is to set the frameskipping to 2
Essentially, the problem is as extreme64 described. To clarify though, basically, since the DirectX plugin is now optimized, it won't eat your CPU. So the result is that your GFx card processes everything as fast as it can, and that happens to be much slower than your CPU can process everything, so your CPU never hits 100%.
If your GFx card is built into your motherboard, you may be able to adjust the amount of shared memory, so that the GFx card can take advantage of more of your system RAM for itself.
Unfortunately, even if you are able to do that, it's only going to give you a marginal performance boost. The problem is that Intel graphics cards just don't have raw processing power like nVidia and ATI cards do.
I believe Direct3D always uses system ram for some texture caching, but using system ram is going to be slower. The more you split work between the GPU and CPU, the more overhead you gain. There isn't really anything you can do for speedup, either get a cheap videocard or use Wii.
Thanks for clarifying that. I've been considering a new graphics card for a while now, I guess its time.