Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello. I just recently downloaded the Dolphin Emulator because I wanted to play some old games. I just recently got a couple of Guitar Hero games, but the games are very laggy. The game runs fine enough in the menus, but as soon as I start a song, the FPS starts to drop a considerable amount. I've tried messing around with the settings for a long time and I have yet to find anything that helps with improving performance. I'm really starting to wonder if it's my PC that's causing the issues rather than the Emulator itself.

I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to PC specs, but this is the information I was able to dig up:

• Processor (CPU) - AMD 3020e with Radeon Graphics 1.20 GHz
  
• GPU - AMD Radeon™ Graphics
  
• Memory (RAM) - 4.0 GB 2400 MHz (Speed) and SODIMM (Form factor)
  
• SanDisk 512GB Extreme UHS-I microSDXC Memory Card
  
• Windows 10
  

That's about all I could find. Inb4 anyone tries to suggest Clone Hero, please don't do that. I don't want, nor am I interested in Clone Hero. I want to go back for the nostalgia and career progression of the OG games. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

That appears to be a very low power CPU, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was the bottleneck.

Ehh... so this is a bit of a weird one.

It's Zen1 but it's the APU variant with reduced L3 cache, so it'll be slower per-GHz than standard Ryzen 1000. 1.2GHz is the base clock but it boosts to 2.6GHz, but it only has 2 cores and 2 threads which is basically what Dolphin uses so it's questionable if the CPU would be able to sustain that 2.6GHz.

Also the GPU is a mere Vega 3 which is more comparable to Intel's integrated graphics on their higher-end DDR4 desktop CPUs which is fine for Dolphin, even perhaps at 2x internal resolution, but not exactly great... unless they hampered the system by using a single channel RAM configuration (you can find this out via the program CPU-Z in its "Memory" tab in the "Channel #" section). in which case you'll probably be stuck with 1x internal resolution.

So it doesn't suck, but on the CPU side it's sort of comparable to maybe the likes of desktop Sandy Bridge? (Intel 2nd gen Core, not to be confused with Core 2) You might even want to give the Dolphin 5.0 CPU benchmark a run on it to get a better idea of your CPU's standing (do keep in mind that newer versions of Dolphin would actually run better, particularly on Zen CPUs, but unfortunately Dolphin's newer rolling-release model makes it difficult to pick a single version for benchmark purposes).


Also, Windows 10 with 4GB of RAM? Unless it's a special version of Win10 (i.e. the IoT 21H2 version) or custom stripped/slimmed down, it might be wise to look into something like Linux instead (which should "just work" out of the box without doing anything special—heck, Dolphin can even be installed right from the included "Software Manager" on the likes of Linux Mint to the point that it can even be ran from a live ISO).

Speaking of Windows vs Linux, AMD's OpenGL drivers on Windows were substantially slower than their Linux drivers for a while—this supposedly isn't the case anymore, but we have no idea if said improved performance was ever made available for your somewhat older GPU architecture. Since Dolphin defaults to the OpenGL renderer, you might want to try changing the render backend to something like Vulkan or I suppose Direct3D12 (I've no experience with the latter).

Thanks for the responses!

Another thing that I realized last night about the RAM—you're actually going to have even less than 4GB because it's going to be dynamically shared with the integrated graphics. Now it's not my impression that Dolphin actually needs that much in the way of video memory, especially if you're running at the lower resolutions that would probably be required for decent performance, but it's still not great. For this reason, you might actually want to see if you have any options in the BIOS that let you configure memory exclusively allocated to the graphics which you'd actually want to set to the lower value possible (keeping in mind that some newer native PC games may refuse to launch if the value is set too low).

Worse still is that, because your main storage is only just an SD card, when you run out of RAM, things aren't going to perform all that well.


By the way, if you ever humor yourself and want to try the Linux route and see how its RAM usage works out, I remembered that you can actually install the OS itself onto a USB drive, and I don't mean the OS installer and/or ISO! So if combined with even just a SATA SSD running from USB 3.0, that could have substantially improved storage performance (and even USB 2.0 might not be too bad, though you'd be leaving a lot of disk performance on the table); at least in Linux Mint, the easiest way to install the OS itself to a USB disk is to simply remove all other internal disks—it'll just automatically pick the USB drive then (not counting the USB drive that the ISO itself is running from which I always just recommend doing via Ventoy).

Also, I realized that, with only 4GB of shared RAM, it's questionable whether you'd even be able to install the Dolphin flatpak within a live ISO session anyway, thereby maybe requiring you to just straight-up install the OS proper, or maybe you could alternatively get away with just using of the unofficial AppImage (click on "Releases" on the right side; once downloaded, right-click on the file ▶ Properties ▶ "Permissions" tab ▶ check "Allow executing file as a program", thereby allowing you to run the program by just double-clicking the file).


Other thing is that Linux has a neat function called "zram" that will actually try to first compress RAM when you start to run out, and then if you start to run out again even when compressed is when it'll actually start to overflow by writing to the disk; even on a laptop with a way weaker CPU (E-350) and integrated graphics paired with only 3GB of RAM when trying to run a program that wanted 4GB of RAM, launching said program easily took something like a quarter of the time simply by having zram installed. Some Linux distros actually have begun enabling it by default but, at least on Linux Mint, this can be enabled by simply launching the "Synaptic Package Manager" program, searching for "zram-config", double-clicking on it so that it becomes selected for installation, and then clicking the "install" button...and maybe restarting your PC once the install is done? (afterwards you can check zram usage by running cat /proc/swaps in the terminal).

The one niggle about zram is that it's basically trading CPU cycles for more RAM, and because that CPU only has two CPU cores which is what Dolphin primarily relies on, there's a chance that using zram could actually make performance worse, but only if running Dolphin is able to actually fit within your system RAM when zram is not installed.

(03-30-2024, 05:52 AM)Nintendo Maniac 64 Wrote: [ -> ]Another thing that I realized last night about the RAM—you're actually going to have even less than 4GB because it's going to be dynamically shared with the integrated graphics.  Now it's not my impression that Dolphin actually needs that much in the way of video memory, especially if you're running at the lower resolutions that would probably be required for decent performance, but it's still not great. For this reason, you might actually want to see if you have any options in the BIOS that let you configure memory exclusively allocated to the graphics which you'd actually want to set to the lower value possible (keeping in mind that some newer native PC games may refuse to launch if the value is set too low).

Worse still is that, because your main storage is only just an SD card, when you run out of RAM, things aren't going to perform all that well.


By the way, if you ever humor yourself and want to try the Linux route and see how its RAM usage works out, I remembered that you can actually install the OS itself onto a USB drive, and I don't mean the OS installer and/or ISO! So if combined with even just a SATA SSD running from USB 3.0, that could have substantially improved storage performance (and even USB 2.0 might not be too bad, though you'd be leaving a lot of disk performance on the table); at least in Linux Mint, the easiest way to install the OS itself to a USB disk is to simply remove all other internal disks—it'll just automatically pick the USB drive then (not counting the USB drive that the ISO itself is running from which I always just recommend doing via Ventoy).

Also, I realized that, with only 4GB of shared RAM, it's questionable whether you'd even be able to install the Dolphin flatpak within a live ISO session anyway, thereby either requiring you to use of the unofficial AppImage (click on "Releases" on the right side; once downloaded, right-click on the file ▶ Properties ▶ "Permissions" tab ▶ check "Allow executing file as a program" allow you to run by just double-clicking the file) or requiring you to just straight-up install the OS proper.


Other thing is that Linux has a neat function called "zram" that will actually try to first compress RAM when you start to run out, and then if you start to run out again even when compressed is when it'll actually start to overflow by writing to the disk; even on a laptop with a way weaker CPU (E-350) and integrated graphics paired with only 3GB of RAM when trying to run a program that wanted 4GB of RAM, launching said program easily took something like a quarter of the time simply by having zram installed. Some Linux distros actually have begun enabling it by default but, at least on Linux Mint, this can be enabled by simply launching the "Synaptic Package Manager" program, searching for "zram-config", double-clicking on it so that it becomes selected for installation, and then clicking the "install" button...and maybe restarting your PC once the install is done? (afterwards you can check zram usage by running cat /proc/swaps in the terminal).

The one niggle about zram is that it's basically trading CPU cycles for more RAM, and because that CPU only has two CPU cores which is what Dolphin primarily relies on, there's a chance that using zram could actually make performance worse, but only if running Dolphin is able to actually fit within your system RAM when zram is not installed.

Interesting. I do want to correct you on one thing though, my SD card isn't my only storage. I also have a C:, but I only have 57.4 gigs. It's not a lot compared to my SD card.

Quote:this supposedly isn't the case anymore, but we have no idea if said improved performance was ever made available for your somewhat older GPU architecture.

The big rewrite of summer 2022 affected Vega, so will apply here.