Dolphin stuttering and running some games poorly.

[krisdcc]

Hi there. I've been trying to play a few of my old GC games on Dolphin because I love them (more-so than the trash coming out now) but I'm running into a multitude of problems. My favourite GC games is Wind Waker so I've been trying to get that to run properly. The problem I'm having is that occasionally the game is stuttering and whenever I approach an enemy the game slows down to about 20fps.

My settings are uncluded in the thumnail (clicky clicky!!) and my system specs are in my sig. I also have the latest Dolphin rev. I feel those system specs should be enough but it's also worth a mention that my processor has been OCed to 3.8ghz. Any help would be much appreciated.

[vortextk]

Have you tried directx 11? I've played just the opening section up to getting on the boat, but I also have it at 1080p with 8x AA and pretty much the rest of your settings and it runs really well. I keep it at 4:3 though because of the pop in with using the widescreen hack. Most people seem to use d9 but I've found 11 is almost always the fastest for my computer.


*edit* Oh and disable pixel depth. When I made a fraps recording of the game I couldn't keep that box cleared and record. I didn't learn that fixed the weird flickering on some water/shadows at first so I haven't played with it unchecked. Check that box and look at your framerate.

[krisdcc]

i've tried these settings but it's still messing up occasionally. today i went out and bought Xenoblade Chronicles and brought it home. I fired up my wii and was wtfdisappointed with the graphics so I thought i'd rip it and play it on my pc. finally ripped it and it's running sort of average. i get mostly 25fps constant but it keeps dipping in battles. i built this computer with dolphin in mind and the system should smash all games with AA enabled at 1080p but it doesn't. please, if anyone can offer any incite, how do i get this working properly?
i have both of the pokemon gc games and they run horribly, so does the wii one. can anyone with a similar or worse system than mine post their exact setttings so that i can see where i'm going wrong? thank you very much.

[krisdcc]

Bumping for some answers. dolphin y u no work good?

[pwnedatdolphin]

Not all games get 100% speed with that cpu, an i5 2500k@4.5 ghz is required to run absolutely all games at full speed, wind waker is demanding

[FlotsamX]

Not all games get 100% speed with that cpu, an i5 2500k@4.5 ghz is required to run absolutely all games at full speed, wind waker is demanding

There is no hard "recommended requirement" for Dolphin, and that can't be further from the truth.

My Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.5Ghz can run Wind Waker at full speed in almost every area.

[Xtreme2damax]

I noticed stuttering in a lot of games with revisions within the past half year or year, might be related to some fifo issues that haven't been resolved yet. The same fifo issues that reduced performance in some games especially with EFB to ram and caused crashing in some levels with Sonic Adventure 2 Battle compared to earlier revisions that were faster and didn't have these fifo related issues. I noticed that DX11 is considerably slower at rendering in games than DX9, Hyrule Field in ZTP with/without the speed hack is 50% slower in DX11 than DX9 which I was hoping might have been resolved by now.

[Starscream]

I noticed stuttering in a lot of games with revisions within the past half year or year, might be related to some fifo issues that haven't been resolved yet. The same fifo issues that reduced performance in some games especially with EFB to ram and caused crashing in some levels with Sonic Adventure 2 Battle compared to earlier revisions that were faster and didn't have these fifo related issues. I noticed that DX11 is considerably slower at rendering in games than DX9, Hyrule Field in ZTP with/without the speed hack is 50% slower in DX11 than DX9 which I was hoping might have been resolved by now.

A lot of people seem to be blaming all of Dolphin's problems on some unknown and mysterious fifo issue but no one ever seems to know anything more than the word "fifo". You can't just throw out random ideas about what might be causing issues when you have no idea what you're talking about.

[Xtreme2damax]

I noticed stuttering in a lot of games with revisions within the past half year or year, might be related to some fifo issues that haven't been resolved yet. The same fifo issues that reduced performance in some games especially with EFB to ram and caused crashing in some levels with Sonic Adventure 2 Battle compared to earlier revisions that were faster and didn't have these fifo related issues. I noticed that DX11 is considerably slower at rendering in games than DX9, Hyrule Field in ZTP with/without the speed hack is 50% slower in DX11 than DX9 which I was hoping might have been resolved by now.

A lot of people seem to be blaming all of Dolphin's problems on some unknown and mysterious fifo issue but no one ever seems to know anything more than the word "fifo". You can't just throw out random ideas about what might be causing issues when you have no idea what you're talking about.

Well.. I started noticing these issues around the time of all of the fifo changes were committed. It's not the shadercache obviously as there hasn't been any changes to that afaik or anything recent and that appears to be functioning properly. The JIT has gone through improvements and changes and none of those commits affected the recent stuttering or performance issues. Copy EFB changes might have caused performance issues or at least performance issues with EFB to Ram.

I'm not blaming every performance issue on the Fifo, but some recent within the last year issues are probably Fifo related as I never noticed it or noticed it to this degree until after all the fifo changes were committed, others reported the same issues around that time as well. The crashes in SA2: Battle are most definitely caused by the Fifo changes and even skid said that a while back.

It would be nice to give performance some priority, I remember being able to run LLE interpreter close to the speed that LLE recompiler currently runs at, now LLE interpreter performance is worse than it was back before LLE JIT was implemented. Another thing is that LLE is far too demanding even on modern hardware and unless there is a way to give LLE audio a large'ish speed boost then I think it's about time that fixing HLE audio issues is focused on. It can be done, HLE can be made as compatible as LLE if the developers were willing to work on it and would be much faster, ector even said so himself.

Another thing that would be nice to improve performance is fix the issues with the Texcache-Rewrite builds, the issues don't appear to be severe and don't seem like it would be complicated to fix, at least for developers. These builds were nice because they offered a decent improvement to performance and some EFB effects were possible without requiring EFB to Ram.

Sorry for going on about this, I am only stating my observations.

:Edit: Maybe this would be better split into it's own thread?

[NaturalViolence]

an i5 2500k@4.5 ghz is required to run absolutely all games at full speed,

Nothing can run absolutely all games at full speed.

A lot of people seem to be blaming all of Dolphin's problems on some unknown and mysterious fifo issue but no one ever seems to know anything more than the word "fifo". You can't just throw out random ideas about what might be causing issues when you have no idea what you're talking about.

We actually did have a major stuttering issue that a lot of users were reporting all of the sudden awhile back if you remember. I thought it was really odd that all of the sudden we went from not a single post about stuttering issues to 3-5 posts about it per day. And sure enough it was tracked down to a fifo revision that occurred very recently at the time. But marcos supposedly fixed that if I recall somewhere in the 6600-7000 range. As in he directly said that it was caused by a fifo comment and then made a commit that he said fixed the issues. As far as I know they were fixed *shrugs*. I myself had some pretty severe stuttering issues awhile back but I found that I was able to fix them by turning vsync on for some reason (which doesn't really make any sense if you think about what vsync does).

Something else that is also fairly recent is causing stuttering issues for a lot of users, but whatever it is is hard to pin down. Many users have reported fixes that are just as bizarre as mine but we just don't have any real data to go on. I doubt that it's related to fifo this time but it could be, my stuttering issue popped up somewhere in the 6700-7000 range and hasn't gone away ever since. There were a lot of fifo comments in that range. And like everybody else I only get the issue in certain games.

But he's definitely right about about the SA2 crashes, those were linked to a fifo commit if I recall. But I thought I remembered those being fixed as well.