So your question here is a little broad, so I'm going to recall your prior post and what you said there.
Quote:I'm very new to dolphin, I downloaded it and when I went to play games the frames were extremely low and spikes all the time. I really don't know how to set up dolphin and I have pretty alright specs too and run like rocket league at max settings and still get 140+ frames.
Rocket League is way, WAY easier to run than Dolphin! Dolphin is an emulator, so we have to translate everything that the game is asking the console's PowerPC hardware into something that your host x86 computer can understand. This takes work, a lot of work. As in
thousands of times more work than the original hardware would have to do! Just try interpreter and see how that is. Of course, if you are emulating an NES, who cares, that's easy. But we're emulating a 729mhz computer. A thousand times that is
729 gigahertz. We don't have computers that go that fast. And that's not even mentioning that the GameCube and Wii have a highly complex programmable GPU that we have to translate too, and that translating has to be done on the host CPU as well! So Dolphin does everything it can reduce that workload to something computers from this century are able to run. Mostly this means we emulate as little as possible, only doing exactly what games ask of us, and then doing that as efficiently as possible. However, this means that Dolphin is highly variable, with lighter easy to emulate games that can even be pulled off on a low end chromebook, all the way to some outright beasts that bring even top of the line 2022 computers to their knees *cough Factor5 cough*. Most games are usually somewhere in the middle.
However, what we can't work around is single core nature of Dolphin's workload. What the "stupid link that does not help" was talking about is that we're emulating a single core CPU, and a GPU (I'm simplifying so we'll just leave it at this). We can split the CPU and GPU emulation to separate cores safely enough, but beyond that, we can't really multithread any further. So for Dolphin, it doesn't matter how many cores you have. What matters for Dolphin is your single thread performance - the combination of instructions per clock and pure clockspeed.
Quote:Intel Core 2 quad q9550 @ 2.8ghz
This is your problem. That is a
14 year old CPU. (jeez) Over time CPUs have substantially improved instructions per clock, and 14 years is a LOT of time. Plus, 2.8ghz is a very, very low so it has few clocks to begin with. That CPU is not well suited to Dolphin's workload.
Here, let me try to show you via some numbers. Passmark is a basic CPU benchmark that goes waaaay back, allowing us to we can compare different architectures across decades. Here's how your q9550 compares to a modern system in single threaded performance. We'll even make this easy and just compare to a Core i5-12400k.
Intel Core 2 quad q9550 - 1220
Intel Core i5-12400 - 3522
Your CPU has a third of the single threaded performance of a modern
value CPU.
So there is no magic bullet of settings or configuration that you can use to get around this. Your hardware is just terribly weak. Dolphin will still run on it of course, but as I said earlier, how Dolphin performs depends on what the game asks of its original hardware. With so little power available on that system though, the range of games that can be run on it at fullspeed will be very, very small. And there's nothing we can do about your hardware.