Emulator

Game Name?

All

Game ID? (right click the game in the game list, Properties, Info tab)

All

What's the problem? Describe what went wrong.

Users with good performance have been showing up in support channels the past few days with a common issue. Dolphin suddenly performs poorly on their laptop device. The first time this happened, I went through a very lengthy debug process before finding nothing wrong. At the end, I noticed in the screenshots they had a NVIDIA GTX 1650. Remembering our old Optimus issues, I asked them to change the name of the Dolphin executable. They changed it to something along the liens of "pleasework.exe" and suddenly their performance was back.

I thought it was a one off issue, but it has now repeated itself two more times. The common thread between users has been a modern GTX card (1060 and newer) on a laptop using Optimus. I had them try their IntelHD onboard cards and they were not affected by the issue. The end support I gave the users was to rename the executable and go on their merry way.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

Have an Optimus Laptop Afflicted by the Issue
Download the Latest NVIDIA drivers
Observe performance issues

Is the issue present in the latest development version? For future reference, please also write down the version number of the latest development version.

It is present across all versions. Reproduced in 5.0 and 5.0-17995

As mentioned, the 3 GPUs across 4 users I've seen are 1650s, 2060, and a 1060, all on Intel based laptops and Windows. It is unknown exactly when this driver issue creeped up but reverting to older builds does not fix it, and I didn't feel it was fair to ask users to bisect drivers.