Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm using a MacBook Pro 2016 (13 inch) with an RX 480 connected through Thunderbolt 3 to try to play Twilight Princess (Gamecube version) but I'm getting really low fps and simulation speed.

I can't seem to find what is the issue though, the GPU is more than enough (on 4x the fps start to drop, left it at 2x to give it plenty of headroom) and the CPU appears to be half loaded only (using 10w out of the 19w it uses when fully loaded), the activity monitor reports 90% CPU usage (Unix kind, 100% means one core load) and the CPU history doesn't show any specific core loaded to the max.

macOS might be spinning the thread around too fast to be shown but I don't think that's the issue since the activity monitor would report at least 100% CPU usage, I have also heard about the poor OpenGL drivers Apple uses, but graphics settings don't make a difference. Any ideas?

Have you enabled the Hyrule Field Speed Hack (in the Patches tab of the game properties)?

(02-20-2019, 04:25 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]Have you enabled the Hyrule Field Speed Hack (in the Patches tab of the game properties)?

I wasn't!! didn't knew I had to do that.

Now it's running perfectly. Thanks a ton.

Still curious about why it run so slowly before if it wasn't using maxing out a core.

If the CPU and GPU emulation threads have to keep waiting on each other enough for whatever reason, it will appear as if cores aren't being used. No process monitor has a high enough update rate to catch milliseconds long things that a thread is crunching on.

Anyways the hyrule speed hack skips rendering some fairly obnoxious (and minor) things ZTP did because the GC/Wii GPU can do it at no cost but is wildly expensive in comparison on a PC GPU.