Dolphin Runs slow with everything, HALP PLEASE

[Rosgath]

So I've been having some really bad slowdown with running dolphin 3.0 on my comp and was hoping someone could help me. These are my computer's stats (that are relevant as far as I know):

Windows Vista (Service pack 1)

Intel Core 2 DUO CPU (2Ghz, dual core)
4gb ram
64 bit operating system

Graphics Card ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4650
Bus Type PCIe x16 Gen 2.0
Memory Size (MB) 512
Memory Type GDDR3
GPU Clock (MHz) 550
Memory Clock (MHz) 800
Stream Processing Units 320

I normally get like, 70%ish. Would this be normal for this setup or should I be getting better?

[meganova]

Which games? and your settings?

Don't expect too much with your current specs, it may runs most of the games, but slowdown will still happen.

[crimsonedge]

Most of the emulators for the more modern consoles require you to have a somewhat beefy system to have any chance at getting full speed. Meaning at least a decent Quad core, or if you happen to have a very high clock Dual core around 3GHZ.

And does that happen to be a laptop you are using? The "Mobility" Radeon gave that one away. They don't perform as well compared to a similar spec'd PC.

[Rosgath]

Which games? and your settings?

Don't expect too much with your current specs, it may runs most of the games, but slowdown will still happen.

The games that are running slow (only have 3) are Super Smash Bros. Melee and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. I've also started playing Resident Evil: Code Veronica X which also slows down occasionally. The third REALLY perplexes me because I have the first disc of the same game Running on Nulldc (Dreamcast emulator. Couldn't find the second disc of the game for DC) and yet I get no slowdown whatsoever from nulldc

As far as settings go, I generally run with the default settings for the emulator from when I downloaded it from here. Not really sure which settings would be relevant.

Most of the emulators for the more modern consoles require you to have a somewhat beefy system to have any chance at getting full speed. Meaning at least a decent Quad core, or if you happen to have a very high clock Dual core around 3GHZ.

And does that happen to be a laptop you are using? The "Mobility" Radeon gave that one away. They don't perform as well compared to a similar spec'd PC.

Yes it is a Laptop and while I understand it's probably not gonna be as fast and I should expect SOME slowdown, I wouldn't really expect it to be so slow as to be unplayable which in most cases it is.

[meganova]

Check whether Dual Core was enabled on General Tab, if all settings are in defaults, change the Framelimit to 120 and enable Audio Throttle on DSP.
and hope there will some boost on it.

If not, upgrade your machine, or just live with it. Those games you're trying to play are very demanding anyway, which requires more CPU power compared to other games.

[Zorlon]

NullDC will run beter anyway just because the emulator requirments are lower than Dolphin the fact that the same game was released on both system has nothing to do with how well it will run emulated, that has more to do with how well each emulator was programmed and how much PC resources are used to emulate the CPU, GPU and SPU of each system, also the more acurate an emulator emulates each processor the more power it will need to do that, various speed up options/hacks tend to lower the acuracy/bypass parts of the processing to make things go a lil faster, think of frameskipping but for CPU processes (it's not realy like that lol but to make it simple it's a lil like that)

Personly I would just buy a Wii and soft-mod it rather than upgading a PC but thats just me (No glitches no slowdowns no problem and no pile of DVD's, just use a USB HDD)

Even the GameCube is softmoddable to read DVD-R's (some will lag though), but the Wii will play both GameCube (via HDD with one of the newer softmod methods [personly not tested it yet]) and Wii games from HDD

Or buy a Dreamcast and do nothing to it because it can play CD-R backups without a mod of any kind (US models need to be made in a certain date range, all PAL models will play CD-R's ) [You should be able to find those cheap]

[crimsonedge]

Yes it is a Laptop and while I understand it's probably not gonna be as fast and I should expect SOME slowdown, I wouldn't really expect it to be so slow as to be unplayable which in most cases it is.

Try what meganova suggested, if that doesn't work then you are pretty much out of luck. This emulator isn't even as CPU hungry as PCSX2. What you have is an OK laptop, and you need better than just an OK laptop to play most games these days, especially emulators emulating modern consoles like the Dolphin does. Solid gaming laptops cost a lot of money.

[anthonyp555]

you got pretty good specs but you will still need a good system to run this emulator on high end settings, try updationg your video card drivers