Adventures in Dolphin: The Tale of the Fucked up CPU Usage

[Kurausukun]

Inspired by the progress report and video, I wanted to try running Majora's Mask with the CPU overclock since, for whatever reason, it never occurred to me that I could fix GC Majora's Mask's terrible framerate issues with this. At first, all was well; I was running at 100%, stable 20fps, everything. I walked into East Clock Town and marveled at how it maintained its framerate. However, it did not last long; the game started randomly slowing down, completely independent of what was going on in-game. I was literally waiting at the platform outside the clock tower waiting for the night of the third day, and at times I was running at 100%, and at other times I was down to 60%. I opened task manager and monitored my CPU, and found that for some unknown reason, my CPU usage was steadily climbing and then randomly going back down. It would start at around 5% usage, then it would start climbing to around 10%, and then it would start slowing down ingame, and then it reached around 25%, stayed there for a while, and then randomly went back down to 5% and the lag cleared up. I wasn't even running anything else; I have no idea how this could have happened. My overclock was 128%, and I was using the widescreen code. What exactly should I be investigating here?

[ExtremeDude2]

Temps?

[Kurausukun]

Honestly I didn't check. At first I thought it might be throttling, but the behavior of the fan didn't seem to match that, and at no point was the fan ever going at max. When the usage was lower, the fans turned off, and they only went back on when it started climbing back up to 15-25%. But it's possible, so I'll test it. It just seems unlikely to me since I doubt it's that demanding of a game anyway; I run Sonic Colors with the 60FPS hack using the overclock, and this has never happened there.

EDIT: I have now done some testing using hwmonitor. This time I put the overclock on 200% just to see. My Temps were around 60 degrees before I started playing, and started to rise once I was in Majora's Mask. I was looking mostly at clocks 1 and 2, since they saw the most usage--the temps never exceeded 84 degrees, and usually they were jumping around from the 75-80 degree range. But the temperatures weren't really different when the slowdown was happening versus when it wasn't--and looking at the usage of my cores (also using hwmonitor) revealed the same thing that Task Manager was telling me--CPU usage was randomly increasing for seemingly no good reason--I stood in the middle of East Clock Town, a particularly laggy area on console, and the framerate didn't budge, but I would go off and do something else only for the game to start slowing down--and then suddenly go back to normal.

[Kurausukun]

hey it would be totally rad if this didn't just die amirite

[Helios]

throttling can happen in the 70-80c range depending on CPU.


Also, emulated CPU overclock is basically unsupported and it tells you not to report any bugs that happen when messing with it. It was just exposed to the user because it does have a sizable amount of useful use cases.

[DrHouse64]

He just want to know if performance drops are really a CPU overclock side effect (in this case, I agree with you, there's nothing to report) or if it's something else.

I'm gonna give it a try once I have some free time.

[Kurausukun]

I wasn't really reporting this as a bug; I just wanted to know if anyone had any immediate suspicions as to what was causing it, or if they could reproduce it. Again, throttling just seems unlikely to me; you said throttling can happen in the 70-80 range, but it was my impression that most modern Intel chips start throttling at 90--at least, I just did a search and most people are saying they can hit 90 without throttling on an i7-4720HQ.

[JMC47]

The GameCube Majora's Mask is weird. It will suddenly feel like lagging occasionally regardless of your framerate.

[Admentus]

Well... Majora's Mask from the Collector's Edition disc is one of those games where the CPU Clock Override is actually essential to having a smooth experience. I usally leave the CPU Clock Override at about 150%, which works well. Yeah, some games might break because of the CPU Clock Override but in the case of Majora's Mask there should be no issues with it (trust me, I replayed through every inch of this game).

Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask also seem to work quite well with SSAA x8 (aka, no noticable slowdown) whilst every other GameCube or Wii game practically murders my system with SSAA x8 (or any SSAA setting at all). For those N64 games I could just as well set the Internal Resolution to 4X (I normally stick to 3X) and the FPS does not ever batter. Again, GameCube and Wii games will suffer from huge FPS drops. Only Anisotropic Filtering seems to work well in all games (aka, no noticable slowdown).

Yeah... Dolphin pretty much kills Project64 since I am just use Dolphin's Virtual Console instead.

The Virtual Console version of Majora's Mask is still broken, right? It is basically the same game as on the Collector's Edition disc, so how does the Virtual Console version not work? This leaves me to wonder, would the Virtual Console version have better performances than the Collector's Edition version? Well... Ocarina of Time should also use the CPU Clock Override, especially with those nifty quality enhancement codes.

[DrHouse64]

Yeah, the embedded emulator from Virtual Console Majora's Mask is different from the GameCube Collector one. It's more optimized, and it doesn't have the sound bug GC version have. The only drawback is the lack of Rumble support (afaik).

Also, it seems like Majora's Mask VC emulator is different from other VC games. Rom injection compatibility is different.

I also pretty much gave up on Project64. The last good version was 1.6, and for some reasons GlideN64 is much heavier on my GPU than Dolphin.