Dolphin and GPU load management

[themanuel]

Recently I posted on Reddit about a recent FPS loss I had experienced in Super Mario Sunshine with Vulkan, under certain conditions.  I suspect I still haven't found the root cause because I have not eliminated the issue 100%, but it was helped tremendously by increasing the minimum GPU clock allowed for Dolphin, through an AMD Radeon profile, as described here.

I have given up on finding the original root cause and will chalk it up to the vagaries of using AMD cards for emulation (next time I'll know better), but I still can't understand why forcing the minimum GPU clock would help Dolphin.  If I don't force it, the clock never even breaks 1000MHz out of a maximum 1850Hz, even when it's dropping frames.  By forcing the minimum to 1650Hz, I am able to hold 60FPS almost all of the time.  I tried this with Cemu and it did not have any impact on my framerates, under certain use cases I have for testing, where I am short of 60FPS.

Should not the driver manage the load so that the clock reaches its maximum value by itself when needed?
By the way, the CPU is not even breaking a sweat during these situations, so it's no like it is a CPU-bound scenario (raising the GPU clock would not help in that case).

[AnyOldName3]

Dolphin spends a lot of time with the CPU doing stuff and the GPU doing nothing and also with the GPU doing stuff and the CPU doing nothing. We used to have a lot of issues with drivers seeing the time the GPU was doing nothing and deciding that they didn't need to clock up, but eventually this was resolved by drivers adding Dolphin to their list of things that need the GPU to be fast. I'm guessing someone at AMD accidentally took Dolphin off the list or Dolphin's changed enough that it's no longer detected.

[themanuel]

(11-21-2020, 01:06 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: Dolphin spends a lot of time with the CPU doing stuff and the GPU doing nothing and also with the GPU doing stuff and the CPU doing nothing. We used to have a lot of issues with drivers seeing the time the GPU was doing nothing and deciding that they didn't need to clock up, but eventually this was resolved by drivers adding Dolphin to their list of things that need the GPU to be fast. I'm guessing someone at AMD accidentally took Dolphin off the list or Dolphin's changed enough that it's no longer detected.

Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. Is there a way to force-add Dolphin by myself to this list?

[themanuel]

Bringing this to a close, I reinstalled Windows 10 ("Reset this PC") and the problem was resolved.