How to increase speed and flow of movement on Dolphin Emulator

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I am trying to play Super Smash Bros Brawl on the Dolphin Emulator but the speed of the game is incredibly slow.

What can I do to prevent this problem, so that I get faster character animations and movement?

Best Answer

Here are a few things you can do, to improve the speed on Dolphin: (Source: Dolphin Wiki Performance Guide)

Config

  • General
    • Enable Dual Core checked. Usually enabled by default, improves performance on multi-core systems.
    • Enable Idle Skipping checked. Usually enabled by default.
    • JIT Recompiler (enabled by default) or JITIL experimental recompiler.
  • Audio
    • DSP HLE emulation
    • DSP on Dedicated Thread checked. Not recommended, according to the Devs.

Graphics

  • General
  • Enhancements
    • Internal Resolution 1x Native
    • Anti-Aliasing None
    • Anisotropic Filtering 1x
    • Per-Pixel Lighting unchecked
  • Hacks
    • Skip EFB Access from CPU unchecked
    • Ignore Format Changes checked
    • EFB Copies Texture
    • Texture Cache Fast
    • External Frame Buffer -> Disable checked
    • OpenMP Texture Decoder checked

The bold options may greatly improve performance. Keep in mind, though, that some games require some options to be enabled/disabled, even if this would reduce performance. For example: Skip EFB Access from CPU is an option that greatly reduces emulation speed, but is needed for Super Mario Galaxy.

If messing around with these options do not help achieving a fast enough speed, you may always try this:

Emulation -> Frame Skipping increase the value

This improves the emulation speed, but also results in laggy animations (as a result of skipping frames). The higher the value, the faster the emulation and the laggier the animations will be.
Setting it to 1 or 2 is usually good enough.

If all else fail: Get a faster CPU.
According to the Devs, Dolphin does not benefit from more than 2 cores. Also: More GHz == better (Intel and AMD CPUs do not perform the same at the same clock speed, though, so you might want to keep that in mind before purchase).

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