Dolphin is suddenly running much slower than usual

[Alcratz]

alright, i went ahead and made an account here just to ask about this in my race to figure out whats wrong. i know several people have had this problem in the past, but i couldnt find any good answers during my googling, and im wondering if anyone here has any ideas in 2016

over the weekend i noticed that my ability to play games on dolphin has been gutted or something. when i tried to get down with some no more heroes, it could only barely run at 60 frames in the apartment, and outside i hover around 40fps. this is absolutely baffling to me, because i used to have zero issues running this at full frames several weeks ago, and i even streamed it (as impossible as it is to play with a gamepad). obv it isnt just no more heroes, brawl struggles to stay at full frames and even my gamecube games are stuttering all over the place

the only thing this stuff corresponds with is me accidentally doing a forced shutdown on my desktop the other night (it doesnt like to come out of hibernation, and i held the button down too long while talking to my big man. oops). as such, i thought i mightve corrupted some of dolphins files or something, but i got one of the latest builds from last night and that didnt change anything. i made another attempt by deleting all of my dolphin files and getting 4.0-8664 earlier today, but i still have the same issues. just now i tried 4.0.2, the last stable version, but no cigar

no more heroes is kinda my benchmark right now. i dont get any difference in performance between directx and opengl, downgrading from 2x native internal resolution to auto doesnt change anything. nothing else ive checked or unchecked in the graphics config made any difference. all the basic settings in the normal config are checked, and i have everything else on the recommended/default setting

i saw some people mentioned overheating could be the issue, but i still had the issue after turning my computer on this morning (i shut it off every night). i never changed any settings in the nvidia control panel before (at least for dolphin), and i went ahead and tanked everything earlier, but all that did was make dolphin wig out; no difference in frames

im pretty sure dolphin is the only thing acting strangely. all of my steam games are playing normally, yknow MGSV and GTAV and whatnot. i ran a scan with malwarebytes and it didnt come up with jack squat, not even anything suspicious, so it doesnt look like a virus could be the culprit. im like honestly dumbfounded, this stuff ran with flying colors not too long ago. does anyone here know what could be wrong?

[DJBarry004]

First, it´s a bad idea to compare Dolphin with any known PC game because none of them are as CPU-intensive as Dolphin is.

Second, make sure no other CPU-intensive programs are running on background. And third, have you played the game more than 1 time? Those constant struggles may be related to shader cache, which is generated by the emulator during gameplay.

[Alcratz]

i mentioned real PC games because, while i was trying to see if this was some bigger problem, i didnt see them taking up any more resources than usual. i wasnt comparing the performance, its an example of my thought that this big deal is exclusive to dolphin. i looked a bit further into it by switching myself over to PCSX2, and lo and behold, its working just as well as it normally does

as is implied by the OP, yes, ive played these games more than once. in the case of no more heroes, i was able to play it in the past at solid frames while streaming, and in the case of something else, i was able to play twilight princess without the stuttering being unbearable. if what youre saying about the shader cache is the case, what do i do about it?

also, i should mention that ive done multiple cold reboots while this problem has been a thing. restarting my computer, you guessed it, doesnt make a difference

i caught wind of the idea that the ISOs themselves could be corrupted, and i guess thats the last thing that makes sense to me. every version of dolphin is having this issue, but its the only thing i can find thats behaving like this. but like i said, no more heroes isnt the only game doing this. super smash bros brawl, twilight princess, and metroid prime all used to run just fine, but now they can barely stay at max frames. it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that all of my games got corrupted in the same way, but idunno

[JosJuice]

(01-11-2016, 02:34 PM)Alcratz Wrote: as is implied by the OP, yes, ive played these games more than once.

Yes, but have you played them more than once without deleting Dolphin's files and without changing version? If you do either of those two, the shader cache will be gone.

[Alcratz]

yeah, id been constantly rebooting them for reasons. i guess the shader cache should be all green then, right? or could i be missing something? im starting to sound like a broken record, but obv nothing has changed from the last hundred times i checked their performance

[JMC47]

If you have a performance regression in the latest builds, figure out when it occurred. That's really the only way for anyone to look into it when they can't reproduce it.

[Alcratz]

alright, i feel like i went through every setting ever a thousand times, but... i stumbled over to my documents, found the dolphin files, and deleted all of my config files. now everything is working perfect again. i dont know what it couldve possibly been, but man, now i can finally sleep easy

[DJBarry004]

Well, it´s good to know you managed to solve that.