Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

About a week ago, I was playing Project M, and it was playing at pretty much full speed. 2 hours later, I pull up Dolphin again and it suddenly runs at half speed or lower. Running other games yielded the same results. I've tried:

• Running other intensive programs (ePSXe, Project64); they worked fine.
  
• Running another version of Dolphin (Ishiiruka); it experienced the same issue
  
• Checking my power plan settings; no change, but I tried changing them to highest anyway. No fix.
  
• Restarting my computer; no fix
  
• Uninstalling and reinstalling Dolphin 5.0; still no fix
  
• Completely deleting my config files and starting from scratch; Dolphin performed worse on default settings, and just as poorly as the described issue when I changed them to how I had them before (as expected).
  
• Restarting my computer again; no fix
  
• Extensive googling; everyone else's issue seems to be similarly specific, and if they solve it they usually either do one of the things I tried, or simply don't say what they did to solve it.
  
• Changing every setting in multiple combinations.  I definitely missed some combination or another. Nothing gave any better performance than my normal settings or fixed the sudden performance issues.
  
• Using an experimental build of Dolphin (5.0-3345 x64); the frame-skipping is a nice feature, but it can't come anywhere close to compensating for the (still present) poor performance. No fix.
  
• Using an old build of Dolphin (4.0.2 x64). The performance actually seems to be even worse here.
  

I'm trying to use the 5.0 official build. The only non-default settings I have are:

• Changed the backed to Direct3D 11 and the adapter to my GPU
  
• Borderless Fullscreen
  
• OpenAL audio (XAudio sounded really bad)
  

An interesting thing to note is that the performance will gradually get better as I play the game, and then suddenly get worse.  It will continue to fluctuate like this after a random amount of time.  I've noticed that the performance jumps up significantly when there are no moving backgrounds, but this is to be expected anyway.

Do you guys have any advice on other things to try? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In case my system info isn't included somewhere, I'll put it here.

• Windows 10 x64
  
• 8 GB DDR3 RAM
  
• Intel Core i5-2450M @ 2.5 GHz
  
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
  

I realize my system is pretty low-end, but I've been playing Gamecube and Wii games on Dolphin just fine for around a year now.

If you haven't tried it yet rename the dolphin emulator folder so you reset everything.
Pull up task manager and make sure nothing is using a lot of cpu.
Update you gpu drivers
Watch temps

(04-18-2017, 11:30 AM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]If you haven't tried it yet rename the dolphin emulator folder so you reset everything.
Pull up task manager and make sure nothing is using a lot of cpu.
Update you gpu drivers
Watch temps

Thank you for such a quick response.  I tried changing the folder name and fiddling around a bit, but that by itself still didn't fix it. I did notice that Spider-Man 2 ran at 100% through the intro credits ... and then proceeded to run at 40% in-game (with serious graphical glitches, but I'm not worried about that at the moment). SB Melee ran at 80-100% in the menu, 50% in the character select screen, 100% in the stage select screen, and then %20 percent (actually lower) in the battle on the same stage as before (Big Blue or whatever the moving F-Zero GX stage is).

Dolphin itself is only using around 10% of my CPU, and it is using the highest percentage by far.  Although, 10% seems rather low for this program.  Maybe the issue has something to do with that? Changing the priority of dolphin.exe does nothing noticeable.

I've attempted to update my drivers in the past, but the driver version doesn't change when I run Intel's updater.  Strangely enough, the driver date is 5/19/2016, but the last update for my GPU was back in June of 2015. Nonetheless, I will attempt to update my drivers again and get back to you.

I try to be conscious about overheating.  I don't think it is overheating, and I've had much better performance when the system was a lot hotter. That said, do you have any temperature monitoring programs you recommend?

(04-18-2017, 11:30 AM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]If you haven't tried it yet rename the dolphin emulator folder so you reset everything.
Pull up task manager and make sure nothing is using a lot of cpu.
Update you gpu drivers
Watch temps

My drivers are now up to date.  No change, unfortunately.

Actually it is almost definitely a GPU bottleneck. I don't know of programs to confirm this. Is it the latest drivers of computer manufacturer or generic?

(04-19-2017, 07:16 AM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]Actually it is almost definitely a GPU bottleneck. I don't know of programs to confirm this. Is it the latest drivers of computer manufacturer or generic?

The drivers were published by Windows when Windows 10 was released because Intel stopped supporting gen 2 integrated GPUs with Windows 8.1.  I also tried using the latest drivers published by Intel, but the performance was about the same, if not very slightly worse.  Is there a way that it could be a sudden bottleneck? I had been playing the game just fine only a couple hours before.

You were probably gpu bottlenecking before. I would restore high performance plan to default setting. IDK at this point.

(04-19-2017, 09:24 PM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]You were probably gpu bottlenecking before. I would restore high performance plan to default setting. IDK at this point.

I found out I can play Dark Souls at 20-30 fps (just like I could when Dolphin ran well), and Fallout New Vegas at 30-60 (actually better than before, thanks to mods). It's strange that it is just Dolphin that is giving me so many problems, even with games like 1942.  I guess Dolphin is more graphically intensive than any other program on my computer? I just don't understand why it was so sudden.

Thank you so much for continuing to try to help me.

(04-19-2017, 09:24 PM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]You were probably gpu bottlenecking before. I would restore high performance plan to default setting. IDK at this point.

It's fixed.  I uninstalled Power4Gear Hybrid and modified the power settings through the Control Panel.  This made things work just like they used to.  I'm not sure what Power4Gear Hybrid changed between the one time and the next, but it's gone now.  No more auto-changing power plans, hopefully.

Thank you for trying to help me figure this out.  I guess it did end up being a power plan issue.