Apple M1 Macs get native Dolphin emulator, brings major speed boost
Gary Sims / Android Authority
TL; DR
- The team behind the Dolphin emulator has developed a native version for Apple’s M1 Macs.
- With Rosetta, expect significant performance gains over Intel-based MacBook Pro models and Dolphin.
- The native version of Dolphin also showed far better efficiency.
Apple blew Qualcomm when it launched the first Macs and Macbooks with the arm-based M1 silicon, which are a ton more powerful when compared to the best Windows on Arm computers. In fact, Apple’s first internal chipset for Macs also outperformed many Intel chips in terms of performance and efficiency.
Now the team behind the popular Dolphin emulator for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii has released a native version of the emulator for Apple M1 Macs. And according to the team’s own analysis, the results are pretty stunning.
The Dolphin team found that the x86 version of the emulator was already running quickly under Apple’s own Rosetta translation layer (which allows x86 apps to run on Arm chipsets). In fact, they said it was able to “easily overtake Intel Macs of the same class,” but added that the translation layer was still a major performance bottleneck.
The team overcame several technical challenges in delivering a native version of Dolphin for Apple M1 silicon. How is it going then? Well, the Dolphin team compared the native M1 version of Dolphin to the Rosetta version, the x86 version on the 2018 Macbook Pro with a 4.5 GHz Core i7 processor (8599U) and x86 Dolphin on a Core i9-9900K / RTX-3090 PC. Check out a screenshot of the graphic below for a visual breakdown.
The graphic shows that the native version of Dolphin on a Macbook Air M1 significantly outperforms the Intel-based Macbook Pro from 2018 and at the same time offers a significant increase in performance compared to the x86 version of Dolphin running via Rosetta. It’s completely understandable that Dolphin on the M1 Macbook Air would lag behind the powerful Core i9 / RTX 3090 PC because the Macbook lacks discrete graphics and has a smaller form factor. However, these results suggest that the M1 silicon can handle gaming emulation very well.
Arm-based devices are known to be more efficient than x86-based machines, and it looks like Dolphin, which runs on the Arm-based Apple M1, is too. Check out the graphic below.
“The efficiency is almost literally off the chart. Compared to an absolute monstrosity of a desktop PC, it consumes less than a tenth of the energy and delivers ~ 65% of the power. And the poor Intel MacBook Pro just can’t compare, ”explains the team behind the emulator.
It’s not all perfect, however, as the team finds that GameCube and Wii “full MMU” games like the Rogue Squadron titles and Spider-Man 2 suffer from some performance issues. This seems to be evident in the first graphic, which shows how Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2 runs better on Rosetta than on the native version of the emulator.
Apple doesn’t stop with the M1, however, as you can be sure that the company is working on an updated arm silicon for the next generation of Macs and Macbooks. So we definitely want to see what emulator developers can do with the updated hardware.
