In other games like Star Wards Rogue Squadron II, the performance difference was even more noticeable: only 16 fps on the Intel MacBook Pro versus 49 fps on the Mac M1 with Rosetta 2.īut what about running the emulator in native mode? Since Dolphin Emulator relies on JIT compilation, recompiling it for the M1 and 64-bit ARM architecture was much more complicated - but not impossible. Most games performed well and overall performance was better than a 2018 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 processor.ĭolphin on the Intel MacBook Pro can run Super Smash Bros at 71 fps, while the Mac M1 runs the same game at 79 fps. Apple Silicon form.Įven with the fact that applications running through the Rosetta 2 do not reach the maximum performance provided by the M1 chip, the results have been quite impressive. First, the team has already successfully run several games using Dolphin Emulator on M1 Macs with only the Rosetta 2 translation layer, which allows users to run applications compiled for Intel processors on the platform.

Now, the first tests shared by the developers of Dolphin show that it works twice as fast on M1 as on some Intel Macs.Įmulating games from older consoles like GameCube and Wii might seem easy, but the process is quite complex and requires good hardware.

Since the introduction of the first Macs with M1 last year, the team behind Dolphin - which is a popular Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator - has been working on support for the M1 Macs. Apple's M1 chip has been around for a while now and at this point we all know it performs amazingly well in different situations.

Dolphin emulator pc vs mac