Conduit full speed on old build

[jayelectronica]

There isn't much talk about this game or it's sequel, but Conduit in particular gives my system the flux, and it has only gotten slower with newer dolphin builds. The actual wii game has auto frameskip that doesn't seem to work properly in the emulator, instead the gameplay slows down with the framerate. Anyway, this game actually works properly framerate wise on a really old build of dolphin, one of the old multithreaded fifo attempts, r4937 (which I found on a old build database a while back).

The only conditions are that the debug menu must be initiated. Google will provide the know-how. Once you have your image ready with debug, set dx9 renderer to efb ram, not texture. This actually forces the emulator to become gpu limited (the speed will change depending on the options you set in debug). Now, in the conduit debug menu, turn on depth of field. The framerate will lock at twenty but the game speed will be full. Basically, this old build compensates for slow gpu render thread by skipping frames to keep up with cpu thread, something I've seen others post about before. The Conduit has pc-like settings in debug that actually swamp the gpu thread and change how the emulator functions. This doesn't work on any other build I've ever tested. Also, in debug menu, turn off "blur on reload". That setting forces depth of field off and turns off the frame skip.

This probably works for conduit 2 (it has the same debug menu I think), and any other game that is severly gpu limited in the render thread. Note that changing settings in the dx9 plugin won't work to swamp the gpu thread. It has to be the game doing it. I'm sure nobody cares about these old builds, but at least for conduit, a really hard game to emulate, it works wonders. I don't know the tech or why this build compensates like this in efb ram, but i'm glad it does.



Jay

[LordVador]

You should've posted this in the official game thread: The Conduit. Btw the sequel is here: Conduit 2.

And I agree. Few comments about these games but it's a shame because they're really good

[davew_uk]

Ok - at the risk of looking foolish, I deleted my earlier posts. I didn't want someone to stumble across my less-than-optimal settings in some years to come.

I've been trying to get Conduit 2 working in Dolphin 4.x and managed to get pretty much full speed in the two-player Splitscreen modes with some custom settings. Single Player mode is still horribly slow though. It might go faster on a more powerful machine than mine, I don't know.

So without further ado, these are the best settings I have found for Conduit 2. If you turn vbeam off they may well work in Dolphin 3.5.x as well.

EDIT: I've updated my settings several times, see my last post in this thread for the final version with all game modes working at acceptable speeds

[MayImilae]

The speed other people experience with the game will be different from what you experience. You cannot ask someone if specific settings give fullspeed, because the primary thing that matters is the hardware that it is run on.

davew_uk's profile Wrote:Processor/CPU: Intel Q6600

That's your problem. The Core 2 series is very old at this point; you could really use an upgrade.

[davew_uk]

(02-24-2014, 11:05 PM)MaJoR Wrote: The speed other people experience with the game will be different from what you experience. You cannot ask someone if specific settings give fullspeed, because the primary thing that matters is the hardware that it is run on.

davew_uk's profile Wrote:Processor/CPU: Intel Q6600

That's your problem. The Core 2 series is very old at this point; you could really use an upgrade.

Actually, its not a bad little old processor at all. With a mild overclock it has coped well with almost everything I've thrown at it. I'm happily playing Mario Kart Wii at 60fps in 1080p, for example. I don't know if Mario Kart Wii is particularly CPU-heavy title though. My other games run fine too.

In this case, I'd bet good money that Conduit 2 cannot be run at normal speed on ANY processor without custom settings. Even if it can, I'm happy that with the settings posted above I can run the multiplayer at full speed. If that helps someone, then its all to the better.

EDIT: clarity

[Anti-Ultimate]

Try running Mario Galaxy in full speed. Using LLE.

I doubt your Core 2 Quad can do that, but my i5 surely can. You're being CPU bottlenecked.
Try using a newer build and you'll see how slow it is.

[davew_uk]

Yes, probably. However I don't see how that affects my computer's performance in the game that this thread relates to.

[davew_uk]

OK - just stepping away from the processor discusson for a second. Here are four reasons why I think that the Conduit 2 emulates strangely in Dolphin:-

1. With normal settings, FPS is higher than VPS

2. In general as FPS decreases, VPS *increases*.

3. Frame skipping does nothing to either FPS or VPS.

4. Frame limiting does nothing or works unpredictably.


Normally, you wouldn't expect any of those things to happen. I certainly haven't come across anything like that before.


A couple of screenshots to illustrate:-


In screenshot 1, you will see that FPS is 81 and VPS is just 24. Game is running at half speed.


In screenshot 2 I have put vsync on (no other changes), reducing the FPS to 60. As you can see, VPS has increased proportionally and the game is running a bit faster.


In both cases, Dolphin's frame limiter was set to auto.


I would love to know what kind of results someone with a much faster processor than mine gets - then at least we could eliminate that from the discussion.

[MayImilae]

davew_uk, you may want to put up an issue report on this. It seems like there is something wrong with the framelimiter here.

https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/list

[davew_uk]

Thanks - I'll do that later on this week.