(02-05-2014, 04:26 PM)Shonumi Wrote:

NJMike Wrote:I would have figured a powerful laptop like mine should be able to handle something as simple as Dolphin, if it can handle Crysis 2 decently.

Hmm, looks like you fell for the old "my PC can handle PC games, so it should handle Dolphin just fine" fallacy (note you're really not the first to think this).

Modern PC games rely heavily on the GPU for the bulk of their performance, generally speaking. Dolphin, on the other hand, relies greatly on the CPU for the bulk of its performance. The GPU in Dolphin decides how high you can raise things like Internal Resolution and Anti-aliasing without having the GPU become the system's bottleneck. If your GPU is sufficient for your IR and AA, then the rest lies with your CPU. Turning down the IR to 1x and disabling AA will do nothing for you if it's your CPU that's the bottleneck. Even though PC titles and emulators may all seems like "games" on the surface, they're two different categories of software doing their things in two very different ways. I doubt you'll find any PC title that dynamically recompiles PowerPC code into x86/x64 assembly or translates GC/Wii Flipper commands into equivalent OpenGL or D3D calls.

While your laptop may be fine for modern PC titles, it's pretty weak for Dolphin. In fact your CPU is just about average when it comes to laptops in Dolphin and it's not even close to being one of the best performers. That may sound kind of harsh to hear, but most of us have been running Dolphin and helping others run Dolphin to know what's going to run well and what won't (plus we have a couple of benchmarks available if you're interested in the raw data). Dolphin's a demanding application; there's no way around that fact. That's the price to pay for emulating a complex console like the GC on your laptop.

(02-06-2014, 12:15 AM)Jhonn Wrote: If your problem is just the choppy audio, you can try OpenAL audio backend... It won't make the game run faster, but the audio at least will stop stuttering...

(02-06-2014, 10:12 AM)Jhonn Wrote: Well, in that case, just getting a laptop with a faster processor will help =/
You can also try older versions, they are less demanding but less accurate... Also, they may have issues already solved in the latest development build, so, you won't get support in the forums when using anything older than the latest stable release (currently at 4.0). Give r6515 a try

(02-06-2014, 04:28 PM)Jhonn Wrote: In fact, in that revision you're using still uses the old audio engine that is buggy like a hell. It may not be the case for Sonic Adventure 2 but in many other games it causes issues like missing effects, background music cutting out, cracks/clicks and so on. Since you decided to use an old build, you won't get support, so you will have to deal with bugs like the ones you mentioned (none of them occur in 4.0 stable and current development builds)...