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Dolphin emulation guide for Android device

One of the most common topics on Discord and Reddit in channels dealing with game console emulation is how to set up emulators to give the best performance. Now let me give you some advice on how to set up Dolphin properly. And by that I mean not only this fork but Official Dolphin as well.

• Check out the Dolphin Wiki. It has a lot of information about games, common bugs, and workarounds for them. There are also Gecko codes to enable 16:9 Widescreen in many games that don´t support it on their own and it´s always a better solution than a Widescreen hack!

With that out of the way, let´s check the most critical Dolphin settings.

General settings

• Dual Core - for our slow Android devices this should be on most of the time. Some games require this to be off, otherwise, they may freeze, lock up or act weirdly. Most of the time the settings in GameDB should set it automatically. If it is off for a specific game, it is off for a reason.
• Sync GPU on Skip Idle Hack - turning this off might theoretically give you a small performance boost, but it may also cause weird bugs, freezes, and crashes. Keep it on, unless you are desperate.
• JIT Follow Branch - pretty much what was said in the previous point
• Enable MMU - enable it just for those couple of games that actually requires it
• Override Emulated CPU Clock Speed and CPU Clock speed settings - Gamecube and particularly Wii tiles may benefit from slight underclock. Now to find a good value for your game you have to experiment a bit. Let´s say there is a game that doesn´t run full speed. Enable the override and start at 90% underclock, then go down in 10% steps all the way to 20% if you have to. Check the FPS counter and the game's behavior until you find the sweet spot.

Graphic settings

• Always try the Vulkan backend first, if you encounter graphic bugs, you can switch to OpenGL. As a rule of thumb, Vulkan is faster.

Enhancements

• Internal resolution should be 1x or 1.5x. In 2D or simpler games you can try to bump it up to 2x. If your game doesn´t run well try to lower the internal resolution. Most often than not games are slowed down by a CPU thread rather than GPU. If lowering internal resolution has no noticeable impact on performance, then you should try underclocking the emulated CPU clock speed.

To be continued...