Emulator

But triple buffering increases lag and drops frames, the exact features exclusive full-screen was implemented to have.

The adaptive vsync extension would do what you want, but I believe that's OpenGL only.

AMD Video cards tend to perform better in D3D, and NVIDIAs tend to vary per game.

I don't think there's anything we can do about the vsync that'd work well. I mean, you can turn off vsync and prevent the large drop. Triple buffering only helps a bit; dropping to 40 instead of 30, right?

Well, it's hard to say. Usually the lowest my framerate drops in games I use triple buffering in would be around 40 anyway, regardless of triple buffering. Same goes for Dolphin actually, but the major difference is that the entire game's speed changes pretty drastically as a result of rounding down to 30 with typical v-sync, whereas most native games just skip frames.

I did test v-sync in Dolphin with Sonic Colors, by the way. Even though the game runs at 30FPS, in Planet Wisp act 1, the framerate dropped even further below 30FPS with v-sync on right at the start, but disabling it avoids this.

Also, just disabling v-sync means I get tearing again. =/

I'm definitely looking into triple buffering and improvements to V-Sync in general.

@Jules.Blok is there a way to make adaptive vsync work with dolphin?

Yeah, some V-Sync love would be much appreciated. I have it on pretty much all the time. Recently, I turned it off for a test and was baffled how much better the performance was... but the screen tearing was just too painful D: