I ended up testing the latest Dolphin build too and it performed almost performed as well as Ishiiruka, with a only a few minor FPS drops to 28-29. No stuttering in sound, no drop in FPS in Delfino Plaza and a rock solid 30 FPS in level 1 Hotel Delfino. When I tried the latest build of Ishiiruka, man did it kick it up a notch. Unfortunately, it still dropped to 20 FPS with all the mini bosses on screen in level 1 Hotel Delfino, but it certainly held out longer. I saw an immediate improvement in sound with no stuttering in Delfino Plaza, and only a rare drop from 30 to 27 FPS. After partitioning using boot camp (Windows 8.1 Pro), I ran the stable build of Dolphin. On MacOS (High Sierra), I always had stuttering sound no matter where I went, would experience occasional FPS dips from 30 to 25 in Delfino Plaza, and an atrocious dip to 20 FPS on level 1 Hotel Delfino when all the mini bosses were on screen, and even a dip to 27 FPS with just the big boss. I tested this all out on Super Mario Sunshine using the Delfino Plaza (the large hub world) and the first level of Hotel Delfino (the boss on that level breaks numerous mini bosses, so it's a good test on performance).

I'm not a tech guy, so here's what I did. I also found an even greater performance boost using the latest Dolphin and Ishiiruka builds. I recently caved and partitioned my Mac using Boot Camp to see if performance on the stable 5.0 build would increase, and it definitely did.

For us Mac Dolphin user, our computers usually don't have great specs and high end games or emulation can either be really taxing or impossible (see my specs at the bottom of the post).

Dolphin emulator mac reddit