Download Dolphin Emulator Download Free – 5.0-20347

Dolphin is an emulator for Nintendo GameCube and Nintendo Wii. It allows PC gamers to enjoy games for these two consoles in full HD (1080p) with several improvements: compatibility with all PC controllers, turbo speed, network multiplayer and even more.

Note: The stable versions are years out of date and lack countless features and bug fixes. Beta or development versions are a better choice for almost all users; the stable versions should only be used if you have a specific need for them.

The Windows beta versions require the 64-bit Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 to be installed.

What games can you schedule with Dolphin Emulator?

Dolphin lets you enjoy Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on PC. For a complete list of playable games, you can check out the list here.

What kind of CPU do I need to run Dolphin?

You need a quad-core CPU or better. With four cores, Dolphin has two cores for the main emulation threads, a third core for other tasks, and another core for the OS and background tasks.

Do I need a powerful GPU to run the Dolphin emulator?

A discrete graphics card that supports DirectX11.1 and OpenGL 4.4 is highly recommended. The more powerful the graphics card, the more pixels and enhancements you can throw at it.

• Nvidia: A GeForce GTX 1060 or better Nvidia GPU will be able to play Dolphin in HD resolutions with Ubershaders well.
• AMD: A Radeon RX 570 or better AMD GPU will perform well in Dolphin with Ubershaders. AMD generally favors D3D over OpenGL.
• Intel: Iris Pro iGPUs will handle Dolphin well in D3D on Windows. Integrated graphics older than HD 4000 are not supported.

How much RAM do I need to run Dolphin?

Dolphin requires at least 2 GB of RAM. RAM speed generally has no effect on emulation performance.

Can I use two or more controllers for local multiplayer on the Dolphin emulator?

Yes, if you have two or more friends connecting from the same computer, you can give a single computer multiple controllers. You only need to configure the first two ports on the control configuration page.

What operating systems are supported?

Dolphin is a cross-platform emulator that runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11, Linux, macOS (10.15 Catalina and above) and Android (5.0 and above). Dolphin requires 64-bit operating systems to function properly.

What is new

We have lots of exciting news and features packed into this progress report. On top of normal emulator development, Dolphin’s infrastructure has undergone a massive overhaul. While most of the work has gone into optimizing the backend and hardware to meet new requirements, users may notice some upgrades to user-friendly features such as Dolphin Wiki and FifoCI.

Some focus on infrastructure doesn’t mean there was a slowdown going on for the emulator itself! A slew of new contributors to the project mixed with the efforts of stalwarts have amassed some massive new features no one will want to miss. Headlining this progress report is a massive new performance hack called VBI Skip. If you’re on a weak device that can’t consistently play a game at full speed, VBI Skip is a powerful tool that can help make your game more playable and keep audio crisp and clear. If you’re looking for higher performance overall, a ton of Vulkan optimizations and general emulator optimizations have given Dolphin a pretty big performance boost. A new option called Cull Vertices on CPU can also improve frame rate in many games.

If you want to enjoy some unique games instead, the Skylanders games can now be played without needing a physical Portal of Power connected. You can even use your own character data to pick up where you left off with powerful Skylanders!

We have a lot to get through… but first.

It’s that time again – we have to warn users about a rather annoying issue that can slow down Dolphin’s performance, especially on mobile devices. The culprit this time is Nvidia-based Optimus laptops – users have reported that the discrete NVIDIA graphics card has given them a fraction of the performance of Intel’s onboard graphics!

We are unsure what is wrong and have not been able to pinpoint exactly when it started happening. But if you find that Dolphin is suddenly running slower than before, you can work around the problem! Just add Dolphin to the 3D settings in the Nvidia control panel and set our power management setting to “Prefer maximum performance.” It has been the only way to consistently fix performance.

It’s very rare that we put together a pretty rough hack. But when you show up with such potential to drastically improve playability with minimal impact on maintenance, it was just too much to pass up. The whole story surrounding how this change came out is rather strange.

The most important thing to note is that Sam-Belliveau had a stress-inducing final exam and college applications fast approaching during all of this. Fortunately for all of us, their only consolation for procrastination was messing with Dolphin. One of the things they were working on was improving Dolphin’s throttling, which caused them to mess with what happens when a frame is presented. They ended up messing with the vertical blank interrupt (VBI) timing. This is going to be a huge simplification, but they are essentially interrupts timed to the vertical blanking interval on a CRT TV (also abbreviated as VBI, but more commonly as VBLANK). Since the vertical blanking interval is how a CRT understands the start/end of each frame, the GameCube, which is designed for analog TVs, uses an interrupt to track these and also uses said interrupt to mark the start/end of each frame internally.

During this experimentation, Sam-Belliveaus experimented with what would happen if Dolphin simply ignored or skipped a vertical blanking interrupt when Dolphin got stuck. While their goal was to improve framepacing, the result they got when testing Wii Sports Resort was something no one expected.

Complete release notes here.