Choppy and sluggish. Why?

[TotallyNotMikey]

Alright. This is gonna be a kinda long post, so I'll add a tl;dr for all your lazys. <3

I recently got a laptop which is more than capable for running Gamecube/Wii games. In 3.5 I can run games such as SMG2 at 45fps avg, MH Tri at average 30, and Mario kart wii at 60, ofc. However, on 4.0, all of these games are sluggish and choppy in audio. SMG2 is playable at 30ish fps but the audio is annoying. MHTri, about 29-30, not much difference. MKWii however, runs at about 45, with incredibly choppy audio which causes the game to slow down so badly.

My guess is that the rewritten 4.0 HLE audio thingy is closer to running it on LLE, so it gives me this choppyness. Even on my desktop I get this strange choppyness, even though I can run games almost perfectly in 3.5 using LLE.

Laptop specs:
Intel core i7 4202MQ @ 2.2ghz, turbo 3.2ghz
Nvidia GTX760M 2GB
8GB DDR3 RAM
750GB Hard drive
Resolution is 1600x900

Desktop specs:
Intel core i7 870 @ 4.0ghz, Turbo disabled.
Nvidia GTX660 SLI
8GB DDR3Ram
1tb HDD, paired with 64gb SSD cache
Resolution is 1920x1080

Tl;dr: I believe the rewritten audio thing in 4.0 is causing choppyness. Is this the case? Can I patch in the original HLE codec or something?

[DJBarry004]

Precisely, it´s the new HLE. That choppyness happens because you are not running them at full speed.

If you´re looking for speed, you can even stick with the SVNs (R6515 is a good option), but those are unsupported here.

[TotallyNotMikey]

Hm. Yeah. I'm definately sticking with older versions until this is a little better. I was hoping to have smoother gameplay with the new connectivity to Wii's, but it looks like that will have to wait.

[DJBarry004]

Dude, your thread is in first place in my google search when I type your CPU. Congratulations.

Remember that you won´t get support with old versions.

[admin89]

Well, r6515 is too old (12-04-2010) . You should use Dolphin 3.5 145(Before the big slowdown and new HLE)

[pauldacheez]

DJBarry, *please* don't tell people to use extremely old builds. Going back to 3.5 is perfectly fine, but pre-3.0 shit is just crazy. Maybe that's fine for oliverfrancisco's poor old PC, but it's needless on a decent Nehalem or Haswell system.

PersonWhoTotallyIsMikey, yeah, new-ax-hle no longer plays audio asynchronously from the actual emulation speed. This fixes numerous crashes and sound-related issues, but now it stutters when you're running the game at anything less than full speed. This should be a net positive for MonHun, since it's still running at full speed, but this obviously isn't as good for MKWii because it's now slower. It isn't actually affecting SMG at all, though, since it doesn't use the AX/AXWii DSP µcodes – it uses the Zelda µcode, which still has broken/asynchronous HLE.

The slowdowns aren't actually caused by the HLE changes, though – it just makes them more obnoxious. There are other changes (mainly in the video backends, plus FIFO-BP and wii-network) that caused this. One thing I keep recommending to people on Nvidia GPUs as a free speedup is to try the OpenGL backend with Vertex Streaming Hack checked, as JMC47 seems to get a massive speedup from it (plus he constantly complains about how slow D3D11 is). This is a new thing in 4.0, since the OpenGL backend has been mostly rewritten.

[DJBarry004]

I was just suggesting a fast one, but whatever...

Talking about oliverfrancisco, did you know that it (his PC) can even run 4.0?

That sounds crazy, though. But it does!

Last edit: If (Paul) is going to reply this, do it in the thread I made instead. https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-how-it%C2%B4s-possible-to-run-dolphin-4-0-using-this-rig