"FPS: 60" ... And yet, lags in game play?

[bushidounohana]

While playing NBA JAM (Wii) on my Windows 7 box, the FPS meter will consistently read "FPS: 60," (game play, not menus) and yet there are noticeable, sporadic lags in the game play (not depicted in the FPS meter). I've adjusted settings as low as 2x internal resolution (with a full screen resolution as low as 1600x900), no AA, 8x AF, all to no avail. Does my experience seem in keeping with the specs and normal settings I have listed below (and the concessions I've attempted to make)? If not, any suggestions on how else to troubleshoot?

Windows 7 (x64)
Intel i7 (3660) @ 3.4GHz
16 GB RAM
EVGA GTX 660ti SC (2 GB VRAM)

Dolphin 4.0-164

Backend: D3D11
Fullscreen Resolution: 1920x1080
Internal Resolution: 4x (2560x2112)
Anti-Aliasing: 4 samples
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
Post-Processing Effect: (off)

Scaled EFB Copy, Per-Pixel Lighting, and Force Texture Filtering all on.

Ignore Format Changes on, EFB Copies Texture selected.
Texture Cache Accuracy set to the "middle" setting.
External Frame Buffer set to Disable.

Open CL, OpenMP, and Fast Depth Calculation all on.

Thank you for reading and responding--any thoughts are much appreciated!

[NaturalViolence]

What do you define as "lag"? Slowdowns? Stuttering? Help me out here.

[bushidounohana]

(10-28-2013, 01:23 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: What do you define as "lag"? Slowdowns? Stuttering? Help me out here.

You bet--what I'm experiencing are extended periods of slowdown during game play. An analogy which might be most apropos (given that I'm playing a sports game) is that game play almost goes into a sort of slow motion. It's not extreme slow down (a la instant replay style), but there is a noticeable, distracting difference. Most prominent slowdown (the only slowdown that is actually indicated in the FPS meter) comes at the tip off of a game or beginning of the third quarter (when returning from a menu screen which is known, according the wiki, to have a FPS impact). What's throwing me is that otherwise within game play the slowdown isn't reflected in the FPS meter.

It might also help for me to note that the only software that I have running in the background is Steam Big Picture mode (which I have set to serve as my shell, so Windows Explorer isn't running nor is anything else like anti-virus or other that might eat up additional resources).

I've successfully gotten the game to run without slowdown on another machine running OS X (with much lesser specs but also proportionately lesser settings--2x internal resolution, 4x AA, 4x AF, Open GL backend), but have yet to replicate the success on the Windows box. I *should* be able to get away with better settings than that on the Windows machine, shouldn't I?

[NaturalViolence]

Turn per-pixel lighting, AA, and openCL off. Also try openGL. If none of that fixes it try checking your cpu and gpu temperatures and clock speeds to make sure nothing is throttling.

[bushidounohana]

(10-28-2013, 03:12 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Turn per-pixel lighting, AA, and openCL off. Also try openGL. If none of that fixes it try checking your cpu and gpu temperatures and clock speeds to make sure nothing is throttling.

Well my solution isn't making much sense to me, but after following your suggestions and adjusting the resolution, I still had issues. Oddly, setting my internal resolution to "Automatic (multiple of 640x528)" and my full screen resolution to "Automatic," seems to rectify the issue (while remaining within the D3D back end).

I'm willing to leave well enough alone, if that "voodoo" remains a solution. While I may have taken a slight visual hit somewhere, my full screen resolution seems to be mirroring the desktop at 1080p.

However, this doesn't make sense to me because I manually took the internal res down as far as 2x and still experienced issues (with per-pixel lighting, AA and Open CL off). Seems a little weak, even for a 660ti, doesn't it? I wonder if throttling is in fact my issue--do you recommend any particular tools for checking on the CPU/GPU while under load? I'm a little new to that end of it ... And I still don't get why the performance hit isn't indicated in the FPS meter ...

And thank you for your time and insights, they're very much appreciated!

[cosmoruski]

I've found that setting a higher internal resolution (even if it is only 2x) makes some, already demanding, games even slower. I have observed this effekt in Metroid Prime. Seems to me that higher internal resolutions also have higher load on CPU ?!
This is unlike PCSX2, where you can basicly set every possible internal resolution and it still produces the same fps, als long an the GPU can handle the resolutions.

I have a Radeon HD 7870, which is somewhere in the performance region of your 660ti

[NaturalViolence]

I still think something is probably throttling. Use HWINFO64 to check.

[bushidounohana]

Thanks for all the replies--I'll do some investigating with WHiNFO64 and report back with what I find.

[NaturalViolence]

@londasgt

Input is on a separate thread. Though I don't know what could be wrong here or how you would test for it.

[bushidounohana]

Throttling is indeed the culprit, specifically of the GPU. I'm trying to finesse some settings within EVGA Precision to see if keeping the card cool helps ... Any suggestions otherwise?