Why is Dolphin Emulator slow on Macbook Air 2014?

[I36]

I've been trying to play Gamecube and Wii games on my Macbook Air 2014 using the Dolphin Emulator, but they don't run as smoothly as I expected even at their native resolution. I know that my Macbook is so much more powerful than a Gamecube or Wii, but even running at base settings with different performance hacks enabled I can only get the game to run at ~15fps. Any ideas?

 

[Supernova1138]

Emulation requires a lot of CPU power, far more than what the original console has. Your Macbook Air isn't ideal for emulation because it has a slow mobile CPU. The lack of cooling to get the extra thin form factor and light weight also likely isn't helping, as it means you're less likely to get the 2.7GHz turbo clock due to thermal restrictions, and your CPU likely runs at the much slower 1.4GHz base clock.

Do also keep in mind that some games still aren't up to good performance on the Dolphin eg. the Rogue Squadron games still have performance issues in some levels even with a high end desktop PC running the emulator.

All you can really do is make sure your laptop is plugged in and running at maximum performance mode when trying to run the emulator, if you can manually increase the fan speed, that might help improve the thermals and help you get better results with the Turbo Boost clocks.

 

[LORDPrometheus]

First off comparing the raw power of your macbook to the original console isn't a valid comparison. The gamecube is built to run gamecube games and the Mac is built to run x86 applications in a Linux environment. This is why most emulators have problems even on very high end hardware and in some cases having too high end hardware can actually break games by making them run too fast for their engine. This inefficiency can lead to some emulators requiring much much more powerful hardware than the original console did.

If you are using a 2014 macbook air you likely have a down-clocked dual core i5 4250U chip and 4gb or ram using onboard intel 5000 graphics. this isn't spectacular by any means and is actually well below what Dolphin recommends and very few users have listed chips of that grade as working and all of those were at stock clock speeds not .8GHz below what it is supposed to be (macs tend to do that a lot).

Therefore i suspect this is mostly down to a lack of hardware power however i would recommend trying some of the fixes listed on their FAQ either way.

https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/