Experiencing massive slowdown in Project M. What are the proper settings?

[Aikawa Kizuna]

Pretty sure my PC is powerful enough, I just probably need to tweak the settings a bit. Not sure what I need.

My specs:
Processor: AMD FX-4130 Quad Core Processor (3.8 GHz)
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7770

Slowdown in menus causes music to stutter, but matches lag terribly. I used to play regular Brawl on my old computer which was significantly weaker (much worse video card and only a 2.9 Quad Core processor) and it ran perfectly. What can I do to improve performance?

[admin89]

3 things to keep in mind :
_Latest Dolphin run much slower than older version . We have to sacrifice speed and a bunch of hacks for accuracy
_Your current CPU is weak . It's rated as low-mid range hardware for Dolphin . Bulldozer a.k.a Faildozer (FX-41xx,FX-6100,F-81xx) single threaded performance is even worse than its predecessor Phenom II . The CPU includes only two modules with four integer-cores and two floating-point cores total. As a result, the CPU is not a true quad-core processor. It's better than Hyperthreading of Intel though
_Dolphin is a dual core application . No matter how much cores your CPU have , Dolphin only uses 2->3 cores . A CPU doesn't perform well in single threaded benchmark will have nightmare experience with Dolphin . See Dolphin Benchmark here , low-mid range Dual Core Pentium Ivy Bridge G2030 @ 3.0GHz blow Phenom II x 955 @ 3.6GHz out of water and Phenom II x 955 @ 3.6GHz is on par with FX-6300 @ 3.5GHz . Piledriver (FX-43xx/FX-63xx/FX-83xx) is successor of bulldozer . So don't expect good performance on most games (especially those demanding games) .

Things that you should try :
_Enable "Vertex Streaming Hack" . This hack give huge speed boost for Nvidia users , not sure about AMD
_Use older Dolphin version such as Dolphin 3.5 though you won't get any support from us in case you encounter bugs/glitches ...
_Right-click the game - properties - Tick "Vbeam Speed Hack"

[Aikawa Kizuna]

Okay, I tried enabling Vbeam Speed Hack and that helped a little bit, but I can't seem to find Vertex Streaming Hack anywhere. Where is it?

Also I tried running regular Brawl and it runs fine. So it must have something to do with something that Project M has changed, yeah?

[admin89]

Vertex Streaming Hack is available when you use OpenGL backend instead of Direct3D (recent Dolphin versions only)

[pauldacheez]

VSH usually has no effect (or even breaks things) on AMD/Intel GPUs. There was a recent change to the OpenGL backend, though, that speeds things up quite a bit for AMD GPU users – it's in the current dev builds, go try it out.

[Thethiala]

Also note that any of the new models introduced by Project M (Roy, Mewtwo, alternate costumes) are more taxing than they should be currently. If you only have one of them in a match you should be fine, but when you have three of four it'll cause severe lag. They are looking to fix this in a future release. I don't know if this is the cause of your problems, but you should be aware of it.

[XxZombiePikachu]

lots of the new features are very taxing on project m especially turbo mode and the newest additions(costumes/characters), you are gonna want something more powerful

(12-11-2013, 11:24 AM)Thethiala Wrote: Also note that any of the new models introduced by Project M (Roy, Mewtwo, alternate costumes) are more taxing than they should be currently. If you only have one of them in a match you should be fine, but when you have three of four it'll cause severe lag. They are looking to fix this in a future release. I don't know if this is the cause of your problems, but you should be aware of it.

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something else you can try is a different development builds(none over master 4.0 433 somewhere around there) or the stable 3.5 build which is the one I prefer(gives me a bit of an increase compared to the 4.0.2)