4.0 and 4.01 and 4.0267 slower than 3.5 on Last Story

[ib3killen]

hi guys first of all i would like to say thank you for this emulator its amazing and a life saver after my wii died =./.

Recently i have updated the emulator to 4.0 then 4.01 then 4.0267 all of them are game breakingly slow on the last story and absolutely chop the heck out of the audio, a problem i dont have on 3.5. it did fix some elements of gameplay on galaxy 1 like its smoother but still suffers from slow motion when the fps drops to around 30.

i needed to post this thread and made account to ask whats going on? is dolphin heading in a different direction? why are the new builds slower than the ones before?

again no disrespect i love what you guys have done, i just hope that i wont need different versions for different games like i do now


i tried to delete it and move this thread to general discussion...it wont let me, so mods feel free to remove it. once i see it removed ill repost.

if not i hope someone can shed a little light on the new builds

and just in case anyone's wondering about my specs i should be able to run the new builds perfectly with last story but no luck, same settings applied in 3.5 voila game runs exactly the same as it did on my wii but with better graphics.

cpu i7 920 oc 3.6
gpu gtx 680 sc 2
ram corsair dominator 6gb
windows 7 64 bit

[Shonumi]

ib3killen Wrote:Recently i have updated the emulator to 4.0 then 4.01 then 4.0267 all of them are game breakingly slow on the last story and absolutely chop the heck out of the audio, a problem i dont have on 3.5. it did fix some elements of gameplay on galaxy 1 like its smoother but still suffers from slow motion when the fps drops to around 30.

From 3.5 to 4.0, Dolphin's HLE audio code for a vast majority of games was rewritten. You have to get fullspeed (or close to it) in a game to have decent, non-choppy audio (just like LLE audio). Generally, Dolphin 4.0 and above tends to be more demanding on hardware than 3.5. This is not always the case, but Dolphin tends to get more accurate over time, and usually incurs slowdowns as a trade-off for more accurate emulation.

Please note as well that The Last Story is one of the most demanding games you can play in Dolphin. Even if you overclocked you i7-920 to 4+ GHz, you'd still see slowdowns. You really need something from the last three generations of Intel Hardware (Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, or Haswell) clocked that high to play this game consistently at fullspeed.

Also, don't worry, you this thread is appropriate for either the General Discussion or the Support forum, it's not a problem

[ib3killen]

hmm that explains the slowdowns, so through more accurate emulation the harder the emulator works to provide the closest thing possible to the wii right.

well the newer builds have definitely made mario run allot smoother as long as you dont dip below 40 fps.

but as far as audio goes and performance for the last story i have no idea why i run it perfectly on 3.5 i barely go below 25 fps on 3.5 and even when i do the audio has never stuttered. seriously i have yet to have any stuttering on 3.5

the problems started on 4.0 it runs on 30 fps the instant it goes below that even on 29 fps the audio stutters, the audio only works perfectly if the game is on 30 fps constant. 4.01 has the exact same problem it makes the game completely unplayable. if your not on a constant 30 fps. and in boss battles forget about it the game slows down completely. 4.026 has less audio issues as the other two but it still has the terrible slow down during heavy action even if i still have an average 20-25 fps

on 3.5 there are no slowdowns for me even during heavy boss battles i stay in between 22-29 fps there is no stuttering at all sound stays constant no matter what the fps is

but from what your telling me, there in lies the problem. the emulator is trying to replicate the wii exactly so games that were built around the wii that were optimized like crazy to run at a constant fps on the wii, will have problems on pcs that yea can run it but not in the same exact way the wii can.

is that the reason why the last story runs perfect for me on 3.5? because the emulator isnt as close to replicating the wii as the 4.0 revisions?

man i really hope with further testing and builds dolphin finds a right balance and/or atleast puts in an option for the old hle format so the audio doesnt mess up if the framerate drops a little.

[Shonumi]

ib3killen Wrote:so through more accurate emulation the harder the emulator works to provide the closest thing possible to the wii right.

Generally. In many cases, more accurate emulation means taking more steps to get the correct output, but not always.

ib3killen Wrote:well the newer builds have definitely made mario run allot smoother as long as you dont dip below 40 fps.

Not every game runs slower in 4.0 than in 3.5. That's why I carefully use words like "generally", "usually", or "tend to". The trend is that more games will become more demanding on 4.0 than the other way around, but there are still cases where it's the other way around. I've noticed the SMG tends to run better in 4.0 than 3.5, but not as well as 3.0, speedwise (at least under LLE audio).

ib3killen Wrote:but as far as audio goes and performance for the last story i have no idea why i run it perfectly on 3.5 i barely go below 25 fps on 3.5 and even when i do the audio has never stuttered. seriously i have yet to have any stuttering on 3.5

I already explained this, but perhaps it would be best to go into more detail. 4.0 needs you to run the game at fullspeed to get decent audio, 3.5 didn't. 3.5 used asynchronous audio that wasn't tied to the speed of the emulated GC/Wii's CPU. Basically, emulating the DSP (the co-processor responsible for sound on the GC/Wii) didn't require Dolphin to synchronize it with the emulated CPU. Now the emulated DSP runs in sync with the emulated CPU. If Dolphin can't emulate the GC/Wii CPU at fullspeed, neither will it be able to emulate the DSP at fullspeed, hence the audio will be choppy.

ib3killen Wrote:games that were built around the wii that were optimized like crazy

One has to wonder how "optimized" The Last Story is, given that it has FPS slowdowns on a real Wii :p TLS is infamous for bringing the Wii to its knees. Nevertheless, I suspect the devs did their best (at least one hopes).

ib3killen Wrote:is that the reason why the last story runs perfect for me on 3.5? because the emulator isnt as close to replicating the wii as the 4.0 revisions?

Pretty much what you just said. The changes made between 3.5 and 4.0 reflect more accurate emulation of the GC and Wii systems. Usually more accurate emulation means taking more steps, which means using more hardware resources. Note, the inaccuracies that get corrected aren't always visual glitches or game crashes; they can be so-to-speak "under the hood" changes to the code that most users wouldn't take notice of.

[ib3killen]

oh wow....So thats where this emulator is going. its trying to produce a wii system on pc. not trying to only make wii games work on pc.

i dont know how i feel about that. its a bit disappointing, i feel like a wii game should never stress my pc.

either way i hope you guys atleast streamline it more so it doesnt work as hard, so the performance for some games resembles 3.5.

thanks for enlightening me btw, even though now i got the sadz feel goin on.lol!

[Shonumi]

ib3killen Wrote:oh wow....So thats where this emulator is going. its trying to produce a wii system on pc. not trying to only make wii games work on pc.

i dont know how i feel about that. its a bit disappointing, i feel like a wii game should never stress my pc.

Well, it's not like anyone else (Nintendo included) is trying to make it so that the Wii hardware and (nearly) ever game can be preserved long after real Wiis are a thing of the past. In that aspect, it's good to have an emulator as accurate as possible. I'm willing to bet if you knew all the steps the Dolphin takes to make Wii emulation possible on your PC, you'd probably have a better understanding of why some games require beastly hardware. It's not always about how "powerful" the original hardware is in comparison to your hardware, but how many steps your hardware needs to take to emulate said original hardware. Even SNES emulators like higan can push systems to their limits simply because they take so many steps to emulate the original hardware.

Anyway, you're not alone. A lot of people don't want to have an emulator that needs the latest hardware to run some of their favorite games, but it's the reality of the reality of Dolphin at the moment. There are a handful of things that can be done to speed up the emulator (with the removal of D3D9 as a video backend, there may be some speedups in store for OpenGLand D3D11). Most of the time these speed ups eventually get negated by more slowdowns, but it's not all doom and gloom, mind you.

Though if people want the performance of 3.5, they can always use 3.5; although 3.5 is no longer supported here, we're not forcing anyone to upgrade or die :p

[ib3killen]

very true. well atleast 3.5 is only good for the last story for me so i guess im gonna have to get used to the idea of having multiple versions of dolphin for different games.

either way im gratefull shoot its either that or nothing lol! thanks for explaining it