Dolphin settings that are CPU-limited?

My dolphin is choking on too many pecans!


I'm playing through Pikhacker's hilariously auto-translated Pikmin 2 hack Pecan 2 (the above image shows about the most comprehensible text I've seen in the game…) on my underpowered computer (2017 MacBook Pro i5 3.1 GHz dual core, running Windows 10 through BootCamp) + overpowered external GPU (RTX 2060 in a Razer Core X enclosure). Unfortunately, when I have a large party of pikmin on screen, the frame rate drops from the expected 30 FPS (I've tried the 60FPS patch, but it doesn't seem to work) to about 10. As I understand it, most of the graphics settings (e.g. higher internal resolution) will mostly affect the GPU, so turning them down won't help if my bottleneck is the CPU speed. Obviously it's nice to have graphical enhancements where possible, but it would be a more comfortable experience to not have the slowdown. What settings should I change to reduce the CPU load?

 

The key word turns out to be *mostly*... I had a look at the Dolphin forums and it seems that very few of the settings have a big impact on CPU usage (and as long as you have a fast enough CPU to run a particular game at full speed, there’s basically no benefit to having a faster CPU). But higher internal resolutions tax both CPU and GPU. Lowering it from 4x (1440p) to 3x (1080p) got rid of pretty much all the slowdown.