Dolphin 5.0 Wii Rock Band Frame Drop

[Bub]

I've been testing The Beatles: Rock Band on Dolphin 5.0 to see how the game preforms. The game looks decent and I even managed to get all of my DLC songs from my actual Wii into Dolphin and got it working (it took a bit to do but it was worth it I guess). However, even before I installed the DLC songs, the game freezes occasionally and returns to 60 FPS. This happens frequently in Shea Stadium, but luckily it's almost non-existent in the Abbey Road Studio. It makes the game somewhat unplayable and I have yet to find a fix for it. I haven't tested out other Wii games yet to see if the problem exists there. Anyways, I have a crappy laptop so that might explain it, but if there are settings I could be missing, please let me know! Thank you! :)

P.S. If I go into training mode, there are no frame drops but it's just boring without the crowd and scoring points.
P.P.S Yes I got the game legitimately

[mstreurman]

(05-15-2018, 04:26 PM)Bub Wrote: I've been testing The Beatles: Rock Band on Dolphin 5.0 to see how the game preforms. The game looks decent and I even managed to get all of my DLC songs from my actual Wii into Dolphin and got it working (it took a bit to do but it was worth it I guess). However, even before I installed the DLC songs, the game freezes occasionally and returns to 60 FPS. This happens frequently in Shea Stadium, but luckily it's almost non-existent in the Abbey Road Studio. It makes the game somewhat unplayable and I have yet to find a fix for it. I haven't tested out other Wii games yet to see if the problem exists there. Anyways, I have a crappy laptop so that might explain it, but if there are settings I could be missing, please let me know! Thank you!

P.S. If I go into training mode, there are no frame drops but it's just boring without the crowd and scoring points.
P.P.S Yes I got the game legitimately

Last week completed the game on Hard difficulty, at first I had a lot of problems in this game too, but then I looked at the error log and it seems to try and access the Wii WiFi so I turned it off by disconnecting the PC WiFi. That solved a lot of issues but it would still occasionally freeze. This are my settings:

Graphics:
1x IR
Using Direct3D back-end
no Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic filtering
no Scaled EFB, Per pixel lighting, Force 24-bit or Force texture filtering
Shader compilation set to Asynchronous (Ubershader) and Compile Shaders before starting turned on
On the Hacks Tab I put every tick I could except for Vertex Rounding and moved the Texture cache slider all the way to fast 
On the Advanced tab I turned on Enable Progressive Scan, all other ticks are off

Audio:
HLE and CubeB audio backend

Wii:
Eur PAL60 turned on

My Windows 10 x64 is set up to always use Maximum Performance mode in the Power options, this all is done on the computer that you can find in my profile. It didn't completely eliminate stutters though, but they are not frequent anymore and they are never at the same spot, thus you should be able to finish the game on expert mode without issues except for having to restart a song every now and then because of a stutter.

This is also on the latest version of Dolphin, which you can find on the top of the download page (or just auto-update from a recent version)

If these settings do not fix your issues, then probably your laptop CPU/GPU is too slow to run the game (it is an ultra low power CPU and its low end intergrated GPU) The biggest issue however might still be your iGPU since this game, and other Rockband games, hammer the EFB/XFB (never know which one) quite hard.

If it is the CPU that is too slow you can try to play a bit with the Emulated CPU clockspeed by turning it down a bit, but keep in mind: This might break the game at some point. I'm not completely sure if it does though or if there are any other issues arising from it.

I play this with an Emulated Wii mote with Guitar Hero attachment and my Universal Guitar Hero/Rock Band Wii/PC/PS2/PS3 guitar.

[Bub]

Thanks for the reply! I checked with my config settings and played around with them as well. I even disconnected my Ethernet cable and disabled my wireless connection on my laptop all together. It seems to not freeze so much but like what you said, it occasionally will but at least it is kinda playable (I also tested with the DLC song You Won't See Me and it's the easiest song in the game). I'm currently testing this on the released 5.0 emulator. I have used Dolphin 5.0-2428 and the only difference is that it fixes a lot of the shadering and makes it look like it's being played on an actual Wii system (I will test that version out but I doubt it will make a difference), and yes I have my laptop set to Maximum Performance as well. I am also using an emulated Wiimote. Again, thank you for the reply! I probably keep messing around with it and also will be upgrading from a laptop to a desktop with better specs, but I don't know just yet. I know my laptop isn't powerful enough to handle The Beatles: Rock Band, but at least it's not so bad.

[mstreurman]

(05-16-2018, 04:11 AM)Bub Wrote: Thanks for the reply! I checked with my config settings and played around with them as well. I even disconnected my Ethernet cable and disabled my wireless connection on my laptop all together. It seems to not freeze so much but like what you said, it occasionally will but at least it is kinda playable (I also tested with the DLC song You Won't See Me and it's the easiest song in the game). I'm currently testing this on the released 5.0 emulator. I have used Dolphin 5.0-2428 and the only difference is that it fixes a lot of the shadering and makes it look like it's being played on an actual Wii system (I will test that version out but I doubt it will make a difference), and yes I have my laptop set to Maximum Performance as well. I am also using an emulated Wiimote. Again, thank you for the reply! I probably keep messing around with it and also will be upgrading from a laptop to a desktop with better specs, but I don't know just yet. I know my laptop isn't powerful enough to handle The Beatles: Rock Band, but at least it's not so bad.

Please also upgrade to the latest Dev-version that fixes a lot of said issues.