Dolphin Graphics Settings
Kenneth Melniczek
Dolphin has two performance related configuration windows: Dolphin configuration and Graphics settings, in addition to applying settings per game via their GameINI. Dolphin is a very demanding program, so configuring Dolphin the right way is very important to run titles smoothly. This guide assumes you are on the latest beta or development version. Many of these options were created after the release of Dolphin 5.0 Stable and thus 5.0 Stable is not supported by this guide.
Dolphin's default configurations are centered around a mixture of performance and compatibility. Faster computers may want to disable some of the performance hacks for more stability, where as slower computers and many mobile devices may want to sacrifice stability for even more performance. In this guide, we'll go through some of the easiest ways to gain performance and note the downsides of the various performance hacks in order to help identify when they should be disabled for stability. Settings that do not pertain to performance will not be mentioned in this guide.
Enable Dual Core: A powerful option for gaining performance that has no downsides some of the time. May cause various random issues caused by splitting the CPU and GPU threads onto different cores. The most common downside to this performance boost is the risk for random "Unknown Opcode" issues and the associated crashes. Dolphin will usually disable Dual Core in games that are especially sensitive to CPU GPU desyncs.
DSP-HLE vs DSP-LLE: Most users should never have to change between DSP-HLE and DSP-LLE. DSP-HLE is many times faster and causes no risk of issues in 99% of titles. DSP-LLE is typically used for homebrew titles and debugging. The one exception to this is a case where Dolphin will automatically use DSP-LLE - Neo-Geo Virtual Console titles. Due to a timing quirk in these games, DSP-LLE is required for proper audio.
CPU Emulation Engine: This setting should never be touched by general users. It is set to the fastest option by default regardless of whether you're using Desktop or Android Dolphin builds. Changing this option alone may slowdown your performance by tenfold or more.
Emulated CPU Clock Override: This is one of the most powerful tools for gaining performance on weak devices. By lowering the Emulated CPU Clock Rate below 100%, you can cause the game itself to lag. In many cases, games have a built-in frameskip for lagging, which will lower the requirements of running that game drastically. This setting can also break games if they are relying on specific CPU timings, and should be disabled if new problems suddenly crop up after enabling it. Raising the Emulated CPU Clock Rate makes games more demanding to run, but may cause them to run better if the emulated title was lagging internally.
While Dolphin doesn't particularly need a powerful graphics card, it does want efficient drivers that can handle things that aren't commonly used in modern games. As such, some of the Graphics Settings may have a higher impact on certain GPUs than they do on other GPUs. We'll try to cover the major cases here, but your performance will vary.
Dolphin does not support asynchronous presentation, so users on Laptops and other devices that may limit the screen to 30Hz or lower may want to disable V-Sync to prevent additional lag. If for some reason your game is running at exactly half speed on powerful hardware, V-Sync might be the cause on a 30Hz screen.
Your shader compilation settings can greatly influence performance. Ubershaders are gigantic shaders that allow Dolphin to handle the GameCube's TEV pipeline without having to generate specialized shaders, but come at the cost of being much slower than specialized shaders. Specialized shaders are much faster, however they must be generated on demand and if it takes more than a frame to generate them, the game will stutter while they are generated.
The hacks window is where you'll find a ton of options that can increase performance when leveraged correctly, or break games completely if they're enabled erroneously. Dolphin will usually enable/disable these settings automatically for games that need them, so it is not recommended to change these settings unless you know what you are doing.
The Advanced settings aren't typically for casual users, but there are a few settings that can be leveraged here if you are careful. In this guide, we will ignore most debug/non-performance related options and just focus on the options a user may turn on for various reasons and what they do.
I recently updated my version of dolphin. Now when I launch dolphin from Launchbox the game window opens just fine but I don't get the secondary window that allows you to change dolphin configurations (such as graphic settings and key bindings). I even tried deleting dolphin all together, doing a fresh install and rebooting my pc. Still nothing. When I launch dolphin outside of Launchbox the window I'm referring to opens just fine and I'm able to tweak controller settings to my hearts content. The thing is, before upgrading dolphin, I do believe me previous version of dolphin 5 launched with the secondary window open. Is there something I am doing wrong here, or does this just have to do with using a dev build of dolphin or something? Any help would be appreciated.
Are you not able to edit those by clicking on the Graphics and Controller icons in the image? Been a while since I have messed with my Dolphin settings, but since I set mine up it has always only launched one window.
The window in the screenshot does not pop up. If it did, I could change the setting by clicking on the Graphics and Controller. The reason I want the window to show up is because I have multiple controller profiles for a few different wii games. It's not a huge deal. It's just that it popped up before (in the background behind the game window) and now it doesn't. I can just set it up so it handles most titles and then if I'm really having trouble with one, I can play it outside of Launchbox just using dolphin. Just wanted to know if anyone had any insight as to why this behavior seemed different than it was in the past. But according to Rerto 808 it's always been this way for him. That just wasn't my experience in the past. neil9000 as far as I can tell there is no way to select a different controller profile without using that window. Dolphin just loads whatever you have set as the default.
First, add a blank text file to your Dolphin directory called "portable.txt". This will force Dolphin to save all the config files to the Dolphin directory under a folder named "User" rather than in the windows user documents directory.
Once you've done this and run Dolphin once, you can copy your old files from your Documents directory (My Documents\Dolphin Emulator\*.*) to the dolphin\User directory that was created to make it portable.
Saw your post in my pursuit to fix this same problem, and I just figured it out. All you need to do is go into tools\manage emulators, highlight dolphin and go edit, and under default command line parameters, it should say -b -e, delete the -b. That will make it so dolphin launches with the game list behind as usual, or if you have it set to "render to main window" on dolphin like i do, the interface will be above the game window. No idea what -e does, but it works with that in place still, so no need to change it.
Seems to load everything just fine in fullscreen as long as the start in fullscreen is checked on dolphin. Only difference I'm seeing without -b is it lets me actually change dolphin configs when I alt enter out of fullscreen
necro bump, but this is a terrible response. you're assuming that the way you use launchbox is the way that everyone else wants to use it.
the whole point of using launchbox is its deep customization.
I would like to see some dolphin configuration settings to get better performance. At the moment I'm running an old i5 3570k @4.0ghz 16gb ddr3 1600mhz, gtx980, and the performance is pretty bad, I downgraded from batocera 5.21 to 5.20 because of emulator settings not being saved and now that I can save settings in dolphin the emulation lags from 60fps to down in the 20's, so please guys, share your settings and system specs
joinski every game I run, call of duty 2 big red one, Mario kart double dash, baldur's gate dark alliance, crazy taxi, something is causing lag I took a few screenshots of my settings and what dolphin displays at the start of a game Batocera dolphin settings
lilkuz2005
I looked into my configuration and with 1,5Ghz +2,8Ghz boost and integrated gpu is not the most powerful on earth.
I noticed, I have in GENERAL not checked the box "Use Fullscreen" and in ENHANCEMENTS I have selected native instead of 2x native, that should be a hudge time eating feature.
GameCast i just installed a 240gb ssd, installed manjaro linux, installed dolphin emulator to compare performance and i found that im getting more stable fps in manjaro then batocera, no lag in the same games tested. using the same opengl settings, i also tested in vulkan and the performance is also very smooth, im not sure whats causing the issues in batocera
Going into properties of any Wii game it shows me an option to enable-disable-default Widescreen on the game. I'm trying to disable Widescreen for Mario Party 8 (as I don't like the decorated side bars; I'd rather have black bars), but it happens on any Wii game
I tried disabling Widescreen and it added this to the gameini: