Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey guys,

So I've been using Dolphin for a while now, and I always noticed that many GC games run a lot slower than Wii games.
Which seems to be normal since some GC games use tricks to push the GC a lot.
At first I was thinking my CPU was a bit too old to allow me to play those games in 1080p, so I kind of gave up on that.

But I realized something lately, on laggy games, like for instance Rogue Leader, FZero-GX, and Super Mario Sunshine, my CPU and GPU usage are always around 20% use and never go beyond 50%.
And my RAM is only used at few %

Here is my config:
i7 3770K @3.8GHz
Geforce GTX 1060 6GB
32GB DDR3 @1333Mhz
Windows 10 x64
GC official gamepad with WiiU usb adapter in native mode

For dolphin config (version 5.0-9739):
I tried pretty much all video backend, and they all give me around the same result.
Option used:
- asynchronous ubershaders (synchronous make those games run even slower)
- compile shaders before starting
- vsync (I tried without, it doesn't improve the speed much)
- Wasapi audio backend in HLE (for some reasons, the other ones are stuttering even when the framerate is smooth)
- the internal resolution is on 3x
- no AA or Filtering
- tested with or without custom HD texture, no big change
The other parameters are often game dependent.

So my question is; do you know why it is so laggy when it doesn't seem to be using the full power of my config?
I tried few different monitoring software to be sure, they all give me the same result.

I saw many people saying they play those games in fullHD full speed with a very similar config as mine, I am very confused on how they manage to do so  

Edit: I managed to get Super Mario Sunshine on fullspeed by using the exclusive fullscreen mode and changing some other parameters, but Rogue Leader is still very laggy sadly 
I will try other things, but I think this game won't work fullspeed somehow.

Rogue Leader is among the most demanding games in Dolphin, it's going to be a bit laggy at points. There isn't much you can do.

(03-13-2019, 12:13 AM)Stremon Wrote: [ -> ]Hey guys,

So I've been using Dolphin for a while now, and I always noticed that many GC games run a lot slower than Wii games.
Which seems to be normal since some GC games use tricks to push the GC a lot.
At first I was thinking my CPU was a bit too old to allow me to play those games in 1080p, so I kind of gave up on that.

But I realized something lately, on laggy games, like for instance Rogue Leader, FZero-GX, and Super Mario Sunshine, my CPU and GPU usage are always around 20% use and never go beyond 50%.
And my RAM is only used at few %

Here is my config:
i7 3770K @3.8GHz
Geforce GTX 1060 6GB
32GB DDR3 @1333Mhz
Windows 10 x64
GC official gamepad with WiiU usb adapter in native mode

For dolphin config (version 5.0-9739):
I tried pretty much all video backend, and they all give me around the same result.
Option used:
- asynchronous ubershaders (synchronous make those games run even slower)
- compile shaders before starting
- vsync (I tried without, it doesn't improve the speed much)
- Wasapi audio backend in HLE (for some reasons, the other ones are stuttering even when the framerate is smooth)
- the internal resolution is on 3x
- no AA or Filtering
- tested with or without custom HD texture, no big change
The other parameters are often game dependent.

So my question is; do you know why it is so laggy when it doesn't seem to be using the full power of my config?
I tried few different monitoring software to be sure, they all give me the same result.

I saw many people saying they play those games in fullHD full speed with a very similar config as mine, I am very confused on how they manage to do so  

Edit: I managed to get Super Mario Sunshine on fullspeed by using the exclusive fullscreen mode and changing some other parameters, but Rogue Leader is still very laggy sadly 
I will try other things, but I think this game won't work fullspeed somehow.

Not using all power of your CPU: Dolphin is a DUAL core application, so throwing more cores at it doesn't do anything... 2 cores out of 8 available on your i7 equates to 25% CPU usage max. Then there is the issue of the GPU and CPU (oversimplified): The GPU sometimes has to wait on the CPU calculations and the CPU sometimes has to wait for the GPU drawing pixels, these waits take miliseconds but in computer time that is almost forever, in this wait time either the CPU or GPU is doing nothing. This is also something that cannot be avoided as, unlike PC games, the emulator cannot predict what will happen next (also known as JIT or just in time processing) this is because it has to emulate the GameCube or Wii (not the game but the actual machine), which runs on PowerPC architecture and needs to be translated to PC x86_64 architecture at the exact moment that the game running on the emulated machine asks for it. If your CPU is sufficiently fast you won't see any slowdowns and achieve the magical framecap of 25/50 or 30/60. 

Then there are hardware inefficiencies: what can be done in 1 instruction on the GameCube or Wii sometimes has to be done in 1000 instructions on the PC to get the exact same result. The Rogue Leader games are well known to use a lot of these kind of instructions on the GameCube and thus runs a lot slower on a PC running the Dolphin Emulator that is running the game. (the numbers are fictional but very possible)

And finally ram usage... well... simply said the GameCube had around 48MB of RAM which was shared between GPU and CPU, add Dolphin on top and the emulation layer and you get like 500-1500MB of use purely to run the game... so any excess RAM is used for things that are not Dolphin: Windows, other open applications and so on... If you are only seeing a couple of % use of your RAM you clearly bought to much ram for your computer as you are not using it. I myself have 16GB of RAM and I am rarely able to fill it up (i9 9900k + RTX 2080ti) and I multitask A LOT... The moments that I am able to fill up my RAM is when I am using multiple Virtual Machines at the same time, when I am rendering big video's in Premiere Pro, 3D scenes in Blender/AutoCAD or work with big collections of uncompressed images in Photoshop/Lightroom.