Emulator

Are you sure there isn't anything external causing this? Different settings, maybe a bad bisect due to how sometimes drivers and whatnot will do things differently?

If you're absolutely convinced this build caused the issue, use Visual Studio, do a performance diagnostic on this build and the build before, go to your spot, and then we can look and see if anything at all changed.

As weird as your bisect is, it's not out of the realm of possibility that something weird could be going on.

I've tested this with no other external processes in the background and antivirus shut off. I'm on Nvidia's latest drivers and all of my settings have been tried at default and at 3x IR with FXAA and 16x AF. I'm unfamiliar with Visual Studio, but I'm assuming I just attach the debugger to the process and monitor changes in CPU and memory usage? If that is the case, then my memory stays consistently between 650MB and 700MB in both the 9865 and 9869 builds, and my CPU usage stayed consistently at 25%. If there is some way I can give you a log file or something else, I'd gladly oblige if you can tell me how to do it. I'm unfamiliar with programming.

if you build Dolphin, there's an option to run with performance diagnostics in Visual Studio. You do CPU diagnostics and then it'll give you a graph. Select the part of teh graph that's affected by the slowdown and it'll give a list of functions that are using CPU time.

I'm afraid I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm sorry I can't be of more help. But there is definitely a clear night and day difference on my end in terms of performance between these builds.

It's alright, I'll take over then and set this up.

While I do a perf test, there's a few things you can try. What happens if you unplug all controllers in the spot? Does performance return? Physically or through the configuration menu.

I tried what you said, hotplugging in my Wii U controller adapter and the controller itself, and setting it to none via config menu, but nothing fixed the performance unfortunately. I'll look into what you suggested later this week when I have more time and see if I can run a diagnostic.

So I did some more testing (deleted all my configs) and found something interesting. So I tried playing the latest dev build again and got this error. " FIFO is overflown by GatherPipe, CPU thread is too fast!" So I disabled dual core and now I get full speed. I have no idea what this means, but it works, but I still don't know why earlier versions work with dual core.

That'd explain it - I don't use dualcore and dualcore will randomly break.

That change isn't the one that'd break dualcore though, I think I know which one could though.