How to Lock fps in Dolphin Emulator

In previous versions of the Dolphin Emulator, it was possible to explicitly lock he fps outputted by the emulator.

You could set the system to lock to a specific fps in case your machine was too powerful and was playing the game too fast.

This video shows those setting screens on the older versions:

In the more modern versions of the Dolphin Emulator, you don’t need to concern yourself with this. Dolphin will play the game as fat as it can but will limit the output to the intended fps of that specific game. Some were at 30 fps and some were at 60fps (there may have even been some in between.

Given this, there isn’t really much reason to limit the fps in dolphin emulator.

More likely, you will be asking how do i speed up dolphin emulator which is a topic covered in another post.

About the only thing that you can do if you really do want to limit the fps below what the game is intended to be played at would be to linit the spreed of the game. This will have the same effect as locking the fps because the emulatr will play the game at the specified fraction of the intended fps.

So for a game intended to be played at 60fs and locked at 50%, it will output 30fps. This will make the game essentially unplayable though unless you set up frame skipping as it will be playing at 50% of the intended speed.

You can also set the emulated CPU to be faster or slower than the Wii would run at. This may help variable frame rate games run faster and lowering it may cause the game to frame skip which may improve performance or the smoothness of the game but is also likely to cause glitches etc as it is not how the game was intended to run!

How to get Better fps on Dolphin Emulator

Check out How do I Speed up Dolphin Emulator? The other side of this is that you may want to increase the fps of the dolphin emulator. That’s the subject of another post but generally, Dolphin will be outputting as fast as it can and the only way to get better fps will be to either tweak the settings to get better performance or to get a more powerful PC.

What I am saying there is that there is no magic button to imcrease fps and the dolphin emulator will not be artificially limiting your FPS. If it is running at a lower fps than the game intended then it is because it cant cope well enough to do it faster.

There are ways to get a bit more performance and improve fps but no button or option to tick.

There is a lot of variation between games in terms of complexity and difficulty of emulation. So you may find that one game runs fine at 60 fps but another game fails to even get above 10 fps. Its difficult to know before playing the game and you just have to give it a go and see how your computer copes with it.

As a quick fix, play about with the graphics settings. Try different backends – normally the Vulcan one is good and has recieved a lot of work and optimisation recently.

If you are not sure how fast your game is running, you can tick the “Show FPS” button.

If your game is running at the intended speed then you can try increasing the internal resolution until you experience slowdown (and then back off a bit). If you can’t achieve the intended fps though, a good easy fix is to decrease the internal resolution until the game runs at a steady FPS.