This Mac runs Portal 2 Co-Op on OS X at maxed-out settings and doesn't drop a frame. I figure that the people searching for this answer will have run up against some poor performance already. Each test I made showed the ability to both increase the resolution, and the frame rates rose as well. I will test both of these games properly and report back.Įarly verdict is: If you are wondering if Boot Camp Windows on your mac will increase the performance of Dolphin, the answer I found on my machine is definitely yes.
Zelda Skyward Sword plays smoothly through all the title and game selection screens at 1080p - which was exciting, and rather beautiful, as we plan to play that next. My guess is that at 2.5x or 720p, we would have very few hitches. Mario Galaxy immediately jumped up to 60fps running at 1080p and was completely playable through all the initial screens, and early game play and the first few stars rarely dropped below 60fps, and if it did, it would recover.
The first stars, and main base hub area were slow as slow.ĭolphin on a Mac running on 64bit Windows 10 via Boot Camp: - just seems like Dolphin and Windows play nicer together In the initial run across the plaza to meet peach, fps might hit 60 for short times depending on where the camera was aimed, but mostly were in the 20's. Trouble started before the gameplay, in the early screens of story, and save selection. It plays along decently for short times, but then completely dumps frames down to 21fps or so, and then seems to not recover. Then, I tried Mario Galaxy - which turns out to be nearly unplayable, even with no enhancements whatsoever. But, this didn't make cutscenes play smoothly at all, and certain other things like selecting a saved game screen were very choppy. When I first loaded Skyward Sword however, I had to reduce the enhancements to get smooth frame rates. I have certainly been impressed by the smoothness and quality of up-rezzed Dolphin on the Mac. Results have been completely passable - really no problems at all. Wind Waker, Twilight Princess - both running quite well, at higher-than-original resolutions.
I've been playing zelda titles with my son on and off for about 1 year on Dolphin from within the Mac OS X environment Late 2013 iMac i7 3.5 quad 32 GB ram, NVIDIA GTX 780M 4GBĭolphin on Mac OS X 10.11.2 - it's actually perfectly fine for many games: I'd still love a solid way to play Majora's Mask-but now with a windows install, perhaps i have that. All games I bought, and ripped myself via my Home Brew Wii. I have the Metroid series, Mario Kart, Mario Galaxy, and all the Zeldas ever made. In the mean time, I have some early takes that were distinct. I will do proper tests at some point in the near future. Stop wondering, install windows via boot camp.
It turns out that Dev versions require the 64 bit Visual Studio 2015 - a link is provided at the top of the Downloads page, but this isn't required on macs, so when you're first switching from the Mac platform, it's not obvious. One tiny bit of confusion when first loading Dolphin on the new Windows setup was a string of missing.
My late 2013 imac has a i7 3.5 quad, NVIDIA GTX 780M 4GB, and 32 GB ram I have now done a direct comparison, and Windows via Boot Camp on a mac should be standard advice, and a relatively easy choice for those running Dolphin. There weren't any subject lines that were searchable specifically for this question. This same advice and information is buried in comments of several other threads - with lazy statements such as OS X Sux, but I had a hard time finding definitive advice searching for it via thread subjects. I started this thread after quite a bit of searching - and personal testing on my own machine. It takes merely a few moments to reboot your machine into Windows to run Dolphin at much-improved frame rates and resolutions. It makes a huge difference, particularly with certain games. To those of you with respectable specs on their Mac hardware wondering why they can't run Dolphin with good performance: Install Windows via Boot Camp.