EDIT: I made some pretty major edits so, if you already read this post, then please re-read it. Also, on the subject of "hacks" in Dolphin, there's the major performance "hack" of Config ▶ Advanced ▶ Enable Emulated CPU Clock Override - from there, move the slider to the left to put it to some lesser value (you can modify it while Dolphin is running to immediately compare the difference), keeping in mind that this
will break many games (though, in theory, you may get lucky and things may actually remain playable).
Anyway, it might actually be a bit of both the CPU and the GPU...
First off, AMD's single-threaded CPU performance (which Dolphin cares the most about) kind of stagnated between Phenom II (2009) and Ryzen (2017) so, unless you have some other system (even if it's actually an
older Intel one), you're probably out of luck here. Considering the results in the Dolphin 5.0 benchmark linked in my signature, I really don't think an in-socket upgrade would help much (the fastest FM2/+ result is actually an A10-5800K at 4.6GHz, and a Athlon X4 860K, effectively an A10-7850K without integrated graphics, at 4.2GHz was only 6-7% slower)
And for GPU, the integrated GPU of the A-6000 series does not support Vulkan which means you're stuck using OpenGL with that chip. The problem here is that AMD's OpenGL drivers for older GPUs on Windows isn't very performant so, unless you want to venture into the world of Linux (I like Linux Mint as stated in my signature), then this may also be holding you back - you can tell easily enough if changing from native resolution (640x...) to 2x resolution (1280x...) in Dolphin decreases its performance at all. Now technically this would be something that an in-socket upgrade could help with since the A-7000 series uses a newer, faster GPU architecture that also supports Vulkan but, as stated, I'm not sure about how worth it this would be if you're CPU-bottlenecked since the main upgrade between the A-6000 series and A-7000 series was the integrated graphics.
It can also be worth noting that, if you have only 1x4GB of RAM rather than 2x2GB, then that will hurt your integrated graphics even more.
On the subject of RAM, your OS can make a difference - 4GB is plenty on something like Linux as well as Windows 7, but newer versions of Windows can be a bit troublesome. That being said, I see from your profile that you have Windows 8, and I don't believe Windows 8 has anywhere near as much background stuff as Windows 10 or 11, so I don't
think that'd be an issue, but your RAM being shared with your integrated graphics may make the capacity more tight than it would be otherwise.
...it may at least be worth noting that you can get used older Intel CPUs for something like LGA1150 on ebay that are literally 10 bucks (particularly the overclockable Pentium G3258) that will run circles around you processor's CPU cores in specifically Dolphin, and other older Intel CPUs for LGA1150 (specifically Xeon CPUs) that are literally 20 bucks that will run circles around your processor in
every CPU-based workload.
To be clear though, any inexpensive Intel CPU will have worse integrated graphics performance, but that won't mean anything if your CPU is holding you back, and a cheap discrete GPU can solve that anyway.
On the subject of a cheap discrete GPU, stay away from old pre-GCN AMD GPU architectures since they do not support Vulkan, keeping in mind that some lower-end models from later generations GPUs retain those older pre-GCN architectures. That being said, the R7 250 is on a new enough architecture (GCN 1.0) that it
does indeed support Vulkan... though, if you go just one full tier higher to the R7 260, actually would get you GCN 2.0, but they're moderately more expensive on at least ebay:
That list also shows that there's both a DDR3 and GDDR5 version of the R7 250 - even the DDR3 model would be "fine", but the GDDR5 model would definitely be faster.
Also, amusingly, the A8 and higher in the A-7000 series has a very similar GPU configuration, albeit with GCN 2.0, meaning that its integrated graphics may actually be possibly a bit
faster than specifically the DDR3 version of the R7 250:
There's also the option of the R5 430 GDDR5 which uses the exact same die and goes for a similar price and should perform similarly if not
better than the R7 250 even though the R5 430 GDDR5 uses a 64bit memory bus (according to TechPowerUp, the memory bandwidth is 27% faster on the R5 430 GDDR5 64bit vs the R7 250 DDR3 128bit). Now admittedly It's stock clocks are lower but I would think that the increased memory bandwidth would be more important, especially when it comes to rendering at higher resolutions and/or using high-res texture packs - I mean, Dolphin isn't really
that demanding on the compute and/or shaders of the GPU (at least not without using ubershaders) - though, in theory, due to using the same die, it could probably overclock to the same 1000MHz as the R7 250 with minimal issue. The final thing is that, curiously, the 2GB GDDR5 version of the R5 430 seems to go for a similar price as the 1GB GDDR5 version.
Keep in mind that both the R7 250 and R5 430 come in low-profile form-factors as well as full-size so, if you were to get any such GPU, make sure you get the version that fits your PC case.
Also, oddly enough, the R5 430 isn't listed in the driver download listings on amd.com so you'd have to "cheat" and get the driver for the R7 250 instead (the driver doesn't really care about differences in memory or clockrate).
![[Image: BC6ubX4.jpeg]](https://i.imgur.com/BC6ubX4.jpeg)