Over the past four years, the Community Dolphin Discord Server, which was unaffiliated with the project itself, has become a fantastic community that has been providing support and a hub for Dolphin users. However, if you find that Dolphin is suddenly running slower than before, you can work-around the issue! Simply add Dolphin to the 3D Settings in the Nvidia Control Panel and set our Power Management setting to 'Prefer Maximum Performance.' That has been the only way to consistently fix performance. We're unsure of what is wrong and haven't been able to determine exactly when it started happening. The culprit this time is NVIDIA based Optimus laptops - users have been reporting that the discrete NVIDIA graphics card has been giving them a fraction of the performance of Intel's onboard graphics! It's that time again - we have to warn users of a rather annoying problem that can decimate Dolphin's performance, particularly in mobile devices.

You can even use your own figurine data to continue where you left off with powerful Skylanders! If you're instead looking to enjoy some unique games, the Skylanders games can now be played without needing a physical Portal of Power connected. A new option called Cull Vertices on the CPU can also greatly improve the framerate in many games. If you're looking for higher performance overall, a ton of Vulkan optimizations and general emulator optimizations have given Dolphin a pretty large performance increase. If you're on a weak device that can't consistently play a game full-speed, VBI Skip is a powerful tool that can help make the game more playable and keep audio crisp and clear. Headlining this Progress Report is a massive new performance hack called VBI Skip.

Some focus on the infrastructure doesn't mean there was a slowdown in progress for the actual emulator, though! A bevy of new contributors to the project mixed with the efforts of stalwarts has brought together some massive new features no one will want to miss. While most of the work has gone into optimizing our backend and hardware to meet new demands, users may notice some upgrades to user facing features like the Dolphin Wiki and FifoCI.

On top of the normal emulator development, Dolphin's infrastructure has seen a massive overhaul. We've got a lot of exciting news and features packed into this Progress Report.

Dolphin 5.0 memory card problem