Dolphin sudden slowdown on 4.5ghz rig?

[LordBarker]

Hi all,
been running Dolphin perfectly for ages on my o/c'ed rig but recently ran into some problems.

I set up the best version of Dolphin for each game so essentially I have a number of Dolphin folders so I can get the best settings for each individual game and as such everything from Mario to Metroid ran pretty much perfectly.

However, I was meddling with the bios the other day trying to o/c a little bit more but had no luck. Ah well I thought and simply reset all my bios settings back to normal where Dolphin ran perfectly. Oddly though now on some games - without changing anything on Dolphin - I'm getting framedrops in all games on all the different revisions I have. For example NBA JAM used to run perfectly with only occasional f/drops to about 58 on menus - now it drops to 54 on menus! Another example would be punchout - where it would occasionally drop to 58/59 in-fight it now can drop as low as 53 fps!

Obviously this is something I have altered, but I cannot figure out what.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers

[felipaopl]

Check if Hyper-Threading is enabled (it should be after a BIOS/EFI reset) and disable it. Usually HT doesn't improve a lot and actually could cause worse performance in some scenarios.

[Garteal]

It would help if you stated the Dolphin version and settings you are using.

[LordBarker]

It would help if you stated the Dolphin version and settings you are using.

I would of, but as I stated I'm using about 3 different revisions and have all taken a performace hit since I meddled with the o/c - so it's not an emu settings issue as such.

[Garteal]

So you're 100% positive you haven't altered any settings?
Alright... so you're on 4.5GHz right now?

Can you check your CPU temps with something like CoreTemp and monitor it when you run your games with the different revisions?

[LordBarker]

Hi again,
cheers have been monitoring constantly with realtemp and CPU-Z - and temp never above 60 degrees as have water-cooling.

Check if Hyper-Threading is enabled (it should be after a BIOS/EFI reset) and disable it

I definitely never touched this before...but...miraculously this worked!
Everything runs 60fps constantly - even punch out with the LLE plugin

Very odd, I'm fairly ok with building and o'c-ing but perhaps I altered something by mistake!?

How will disabling hyper-threading affect other programs/games? I use Photoshop regularly, Word and play newer titles like Crysis 2, Arkham City (when it's released!) etc. etc.

Thanks
Paul

[Garteal]

Thats a great temperature, nothing wrong there.
Good to see that disabling HT helped.

Resetting the BIOS to default enabled HT, so that's what happened.

It depends on how optimized the game/application is for Hyperthreading.
But AFAIK, and according so benchmarks and the like, if it improves, it's only a little.

[felipaopl]

Glad to see it worked fine. =)
And yes, with the most recent CPUs Hyper-Threading is quickly becoming irrelevant. You won't notice performance downgrades at all.

[LordBarker]

Thanks for the chart that's ace mate

I'm using CS5.1 so that's perfect. I may use Handbrake in the future so can simply enable it if I use that intensively

Any idea on the P.C game front?

[felipaopl]

Any idea on the P.C game front?

For PC gaming it's basically useless.