[Fixed]Super Mario Galaxy 2 FPS drop when lots of things on screen

[Zaazu]

Hey there,

I have a decent PC, and I'm having FPS issues when lots of things (Mainly star bits) are on my screen. I get around 60FPS most of the time, but as soon as several star bits show up it drops to 40FPS. Is there anything I can do to speed it up?

Specs:

i5 4670k 4.4Ghz
Nvidia GTX 780
8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Ram
Windows 8.1 x64

Dolphin Version 4.0.2

(Changed) Dolphin settings:

DPS: LLE
Backend: OpenGL
Internal resolution: Auto Window Size
Anti-Aliasing: 2x
Anisotropic Filtering: 2x


Thanks for reading!

[pauldacheez]

Check "Vertex Streaming Hack" in Graphics > Hacks. It's a free speedup on Nvidia's drivers that gets rid of a *lot* of GPU driver overhead, thus reducing CPU usage and CPU-GPU transfer latency. (You can also use a current development build of Dolphin that does it by default via an official OpenGL 4.4 feature instead of with a dirty optional hack, as long as you're running recent drivers – whatwasit, 331.20 or so?) I find it hard to believe that you can be CPU-limited with a 4670K at 4.4 GHz (that's the most ideal CPU for Dolphin, plus that's a higher overclock than most would recommend/need), so I'm gonna say it's CPU-GPU transfer latency that's bottlenecking you.

You'll also want to make a profile for Dolphin in the Nvidia drivers, setting it to "High Performance" for the GPU choice and changing the Power Management Mode from "Adaptive" to "Prefer Maximum Performance". This keeps your GPU from repeatedly trying to downclock itself while running Dolphin – the way Dolphin uses OpenGL/Direct3D is unorthodox enough that GPU drivers' power-management algorithms tend to fail on it and reduce performance. (Theoretically, Dolphin could request this setting automatically since Nvidia has an API for this, but their library for it isn't GPLv2-compatible, so Dolphin can't legally use it.)

After you do all that, you can probably turn up the AA/AF further. I'd also recommend you use "Auto (Multiple of 640x528)" or 3x/4x as your Internal Resolution – there are more than a few games that don't enjoy rendering at something other than an integer multiple of the native resolution, and your GTX 780 can surely handle 4x with some AA. Dolphin isn't really that GPU-intensive, anyway.

[Zaazu]

(01-27-2014, 08:26 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: Check "Vertex Streaming Hack" in Graphics > Hacks. It's a free speedup on Nvidia's drivers that gets rid of a *lot* of GPU driver overhead, thus reducing CPU usage and CPU-GPU transfer latency. (You can also use a current development build of Dolphin that does it by default via an official OpenGL 4.4 feature instead of with a dirty optional hack, as long as you're running recent drivers – whatwasit, 331.20 or so?) I find it hard to believe that you can be CPU-limited with a 4670K at 4.4 GHz (that's the most ideal CPU for Dolphin, plus that's a higher overclock than most would recommend/need), so I'm gonna say it's CPU-GPU transfer latency that's bottlenecking you.

You'll also want to make a profile for Dolphin in the Nvidia drivers, setting it to "High Performance" for the GPU choice and changing the Power Management Mode from "Adaptive" to "Prefer Maximum Performance". This keeps your GPU from repeatedly trying to downclock itself while running Dolphin – the way Dolphin uses OpenGL/Direct3D is unorthodox enough that GPU drivers' power-management algorithms tend to fail on it and reduce performance. (Theoretically, Dolphin could request this setting automatically since Nvidia has an API for this, but their library for it isn't GPLv2-compatible, so Dolphin can't legally use it.)

After you do all that, you can probably turn up the AA/AF further. I'd also recommend you use "Auto (Multiple of 640x528)" or 3x/4x as your Internal Resolution – there are more than a few games that don't enjoy rendering at something other than an integer multiple of the native resolution, and your GTX 780 can surely handle 4x with some AA. Dolphin isn't really that GPU-intensive, anyway.

Hey,

Thanks alot for your reply! I'll try all that stuff you said and I'll post back with results!

Edit: FPS is much more stable now thanks! Sometimes it stutters, but other than that i think its good. Do you recommend any other improvements?

[pauldacheez]

I doubt there's anything else that can be improved – at least, not anything entirely sane. The occasional stutters you're running into are likely just Dolphin generating and caching shaders for new areas/effects, which is pretty much unavoidable.

If you think it'd help, feel free to overclock other parts of your system to perilous degrees, e.g. your RAM. I've heard one or two people get an improvement from overclocking their RAM a bit, so you may too. Just make sure that box doesn't explode and burn your house down, eh?

[Zaazu]

(01-27-2014, 04:07 PM)pauldacheez Wrote: I doubt there's anything else that can be improved – at least, not anything entirely sane. The occasional stutters you're running into are likely just Dolphin generating and caching shaders for new areas/effects, which is pretty much unavoidable.

If you think it'd help, feel free to overclock other parts of your system to perilous degrees, e.g. your RAM. I've heard one or two people get an improvement from overclocking their RAM a bit, so you may too. Just make sure that box doesn't explode and burn your house down, eh?

Thanks again for your help!