Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So I have (I think it shows on my information anyway but ill include it) A laptop with an i7-2640M, 2c/4t 2.8ghz base 3.2ghz boost, intel hd 3000, 6GB of ram, 256 gig ssd. All the gamecube games that I have tested have ran horribly. Super mario sunshine, metroid prime, and Paper mario. Very stuttery experience with on average probably 15-20fps. Wii games like mario kart and ssb brawl run perfectly fine. Super mario galaxy also ran terribly, but I know that one is notoriously harsh on performance. I've done a fair bit of research and although im not expecting high resolution/quality gameplay i'm pretty sure that my rig should be capable of at least a 30fps stable experience in gamecube games. I've seen people with macbooks with an i5 2.6ghz and integrated graphics be able to run Super Mario Galaxy, and I even saw one guy in the /r/sufacegogaming forum be able to run Super Mario Sunshine on a Pentium gold that can't boost over 1.7ghz and is a 6W tdp chip!.

So, onto the troubleshooting, the reason I say Dolphin thinks im running on windows 7 (I am definitely 100% on latest version of windows 10) is because when I select the d3d11 backend it gives me a warning message saying so. It lets me select it, however, and I am able to boot into all games with no issues there. Every other video backend does not work at all. I've tried changing my internal resolution to every option available, AA, anistropic filtering, and post processing effects are off. I've tried both synchronous and asynchronous shaders with compile shaders before starting checked and unchecked. Borderless fullscreen is disabled and dual core speedup as well as backend multi-threading are enabled. My speed limit is at 100% (not sure what this setting even does), and my audio and cpu emulation engine are set to the default (fastest). I have tried changing the emulated CPU clock speed setting both up and down and neither help performance, currently its at 100%. I've tried enabling and disabling emulated memory size override.

According to task manager my cpu is boosting all the way to the full 3.2ghz and HWmonitor says my cpu temp never goes above 76C. One thing I noticed was windows takes up a lil chunk of my ram, effectively leaving me with 4GB (since I have 6GB) for all tasks. How much ram does dolphin need? I made sure to run dolphin with everything I could closed out and dolphin priority set to high in task manager. CPU affinity was checked as well.

Onto the usual laptop checks, I tried using the generic high performance plan in windows, that didn't work, so I made a custom plan individually checking each section to make sure it was on maximum performance or 100%. Wasn't sure if I should have link state power management under PCI express set to on or off so I left it on off. My ssd is about 3/8 full. I have 150 gigs of space left. If anyone has suggestions to try I appreciate it. I do realize of course that laptop gaming is super scuffed to begin with so expectations should be kept low.

(10-28-2020, 05:13 AM)Tl27rex Wrote: [ -> ]So, onto the troubleshooting, the reason I say Dolphin thinks im running on windows 7 (I am definitely 100% on latest version of windows 10) is because when I select the d3d11 backend it gives me a warning message saying so. It lets me select it, however, and I am able to boot into all games with no issues there. Every other video backend does not work at all.

It doesn't actually think you are using Windows 7. Rather, it has detected a problem which usually is caused by using Windows 7 but can also be caused by using a very old GPU or very old GPU drivers. The other backends not working is probably for the same reason – the Intel HD 3000 is simply not good for Dolphin.

The CPU itself is also on the old side. Dolphin runs significantly better on Haswell and newer.

(10-28-2020, 05:13 AM)Tl27rex Wrote: [ -> ]One thing I noticed was windows takes up a lil chunk of my ram, effectively leaving me with 4GB (since I have 6GB) for all tasks. How much ram does dolphin need?

Not very much. I believe the FAQ says you should have at least 2 GB of RAM in your system, but either way, 6 GB is definitely more than you need for Dolphin.

Stay with internal resolution 1X

Check also gpu usage by nonitoring software. Does it max 100% too?

Do You have RAM in DUAL Channell ?

Latest gpu drivers i found are super old 2015 https://downloadcenter.intel.com/downloa...duct=80939

Why would GC games work horibly, While Wii okay? Different settings?

(10-28-2020, 08:04 AM)sirdaniel Wrote: [ -> ]Why would GC games work horibly, While Wii okay? Different settings?

It's probably just a coincidence with what games they picked. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a lighter game than all the GameCube games they mentioned.

(10-28-2020, 05:24 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]It doesn't actually think you are using Windows 7. Rather, it has detected a problem which usually is caused by using Windows 7 but can also be caused by using a very old GPU or very old GPU drivers. The other backends not working is probably for the same reason – the Intel HD 3000 is simply not good for Dolphin.

The CPU itself is also on the old side. Dolphin runs significantly better on Haswell and newer.


Not very much. I believe the FAQ says you should have at least 2 GB of RAM in your system, but either way, 6 GB is definitely more than you need for Dolphin.

Yeah I know my system is getting quite long in the tooth even though it was absolutely top of the line in it's time. Do you think using ishiiruka dolphin or perhaps a much older version of dolphin that supports d3d9 will improve performance?

You likely experience better performance however you won't get support for either options. I going off my experience with my i5 2520m laptop by the way.

(10-28-2020, 04:20 PM)themaster123 Wrote: [ -> ]You likely experience better performance however you won't get support for either options. I going off my experience with my i5 2520m laptop by the way.

Mind if I ask what kind of performance you get in super Mario sunshine?

You should probably be able to run at least sunshine. IIRC it ran well on my 3110m and intel hd 4000. Your cpu is probably faster, but your gpu is slower. IIRC 1.5x resolution sometimes slowed down my games, so you might be slow even at 1x. Try 5.0? IIRC gpu requirements are higher for the same speed, but I couldn't find a source for this.

For my curiosity also I try it on the i5-2520m. Both 4.1 and ishiiruka didn't get 100 ingame with any backend i try(direct 9 and 11 mostly). using gpu and task manger I was only around 30-50 gpu but using both cores for the most part(around 50% most of the time) and was at 2.9-3ghz from task manager info. I doubt it would be much better on the i7 though since dolphin doesn't use much more of 2 core most of the time. Keep in mind I don't use the laptop for emulation or gaming I have a much modern laptop for that(i7 7700hq gtx 1070 laptop)

(10-29-2020, 07:15 AM)themaster123 Wrote: [ -> ]For my curiosity also I try it on the i5-2520m. Both 4.1 and ishiiruka didn't get 100 ingame with any backend i try(direct 9 and 11 mostly). using gpu and task manger I was only around 30-50 gpu but using both cores for the most part(around 50% most of the time) and was at 2.9-3ghz from task manager info. I doubt it would be much better on the i7 though since dolphin doesn't use much more of 2 core most of the time. Keep in mind I don't use the laptop for emulation or gaming I have a much modern laptop for that(i7 7700hq gtx 1070 laptop)

You should try 5.0. The JIT was much slower in 4.0.2. I had better performance on 5.0 on my laptop.