Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm using Dolphin 5.0-1328, playing Super Mario Galaxy 1 at 1080p, with HD textures preloaded. I have a pretty beefy CPU (specs posted below for convenience), and it's overclocked a teensy bit too, but I seem to get lag in some areas. It happens frequently in many different areas for short periods, however the most noticeable was in Ghostly Galaxy, the framerate would drop from 60fps to 55fps with very unpleasant audio stretching when the Boo Mushroom popped up. I'm thinking that this could be a result of my GPU, since I have heard this game is GPU intensive. I play in Vulkan because it's the only backend that gets full speed in any game, aside from the glitchy D3D12. I plan to get a GTX 1060 6GB soon, which will hopefully be a good upgrade. I have two questions about this:

1. Is the GPU actually what's making this game play worse? Will a 1060 help?

2. Vulkan seems to still have glitches and missing features, and I've heard that NVIDIA GPUs have better OpenGL support, so will this new GPU let me play games at full speed with OpenGL instead of Vulkan?

Windows 10 Home x64
Intel Core i5-6600k
AMD Radeon HD 7950
EVGA SuperSC 16GB DDR4

It's probably shader compilation, your GPU is fine (On everything but OpenGL)

A GTX 1060 would be a significant upgrade in general.

Quote:Vulkan seems to still have glitches and missing features, and I've heard that NVIDIA GPUs have better OpenGL support, so will this new GPU let me play games at full speed with OpenGL instead of Vulkan?

I have no idea about the other Nvidia users but
As for me , Dx12 is definitely the fastest backend , Vulkan and OpenGL are slower and the slowest backend is Dx11
GTX 1060 is fine but you may find a better deal like this AMD R9 Fury with HBM memory (which is better than GDDR5) for $260 and it also faster than GTX 1060. Especially in DX12 benchmark , it's on par with GTX 1070
The only drawback is the insane power consumption though

@Helios: While some parts could be shader caching, the Boo Mushroom slowdown didn't seem to be so. It was not stuttering, or at least didn't seem so, and from my experience, when games stutter from shaders, the FPS counter does not drop. Plus, whenever I grabbed the Boo Mushroom, the slowdown would disappear, and reappear once the mushroom came back. However, I don't have much experience with it, so I could be wrong.

@Admin89: I specifically want to avoid DX12, as its issues are simply too big. I can't even grab onto ledges in Super Mario Sunshine without the entirety of Dolphin crashing with it. The biggest reason I'd like OpenGL performance specifically is for the added features such as auto-detecting aspect ratio, and for the fixed glitches such as, again Mario Sunshine, with blue squares appearing underground. Good performance on what is considered the best backend is what I'm striving for here.

Yeah as of right now there's nobody interested in maintaining D3D12. Could change in the future, but it's issues aren't being looked at right now.