Galaxy 2: Recording causes FPS to plummet

[stebbinsd]

When I'm playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Dolphin, the framerates will often drop to 60 and 70 percentile whenever any enemies appear on-screen. That's frustrating enough as it is, but when I try to record any footage using my screen capture software, the framerates are absolutely abysmal ... usually around 20-30%, but it's not uncommon for the percentage to drop into single digits.

When I use Dolphin's own recording input in the "movie" tab, I get somewhat better framerates initially, but my video editor can't read the DTM files, so I'm forced to play the recordings in Dolphin and record the recording. But then, it drops to the same abysmal framerates as if I tried to use the screen capture app to capture the gameplay footage in the first instance! It's almost as if Dolphin is actually still rendering the gameplay in the first instance rather than just a recording of it!

I'm using an AMD FX-6300 processor, which is hundreds of times stronger than the original Wii. So I highly doubt that's the problem.

Any ideas on how to get my gameplay (and even more importantly, my recordings) to render a consistent 60fps?

[DJBarry004]

Any AMD CPU before Ryzen won´t be enough for demanding games like SMG2.

Still, make sure you´re running on default settings... and update to at least 5.0. You don´t need LLE audio anymore.

[JosJuice]

DTM files only store button presses, not video, so Dolphin has to re-compute and re-render everything when you play back the DTM file. That's why the performance isn't any better when you're playing back a DTM file.

Typically, when you want to turn a recorded DTM into a video file, you would use Dolphin's built-in video dumping feature, since that will let the output file run at 100% speed even if you get lag while Dolphin is playing back the DTM. I would suggest using 5.0 at the very least if you're going to do this, since the 4.0-era builds don't have proper audio/video sync when dumping. Using a development build would be even better than 5.0 because the dumping performance was improved after 5.0.

[JMC47]

If you don't mind playing in slow motion and only care about video quality, you can use dolphin's built-in frame dumping.

On new builds, OpenGL and Vulkan have an extra feature in the advanced tab for full resolution framedumps. That way, you can dump even 4K video without needing a 4K monitor.

[Blacknite08]

I was able to get Galaxy 2 running with Fraps recording at 60 fps with only a few framerate drops with my AMD FX-6300 (stock speed) on Dolphin 5.0-4869. However I had to change the window size to 576p to keep the framerate that high while recording. Without Fraps, I'm able to play Galaxy 2 at 2x internal resolution with the framerate rarely dropping below 55. If there's good recording software that's less demanding than Fraps, you might be able to get better results.

[JonnyH]

(09-12-2017, 07:11 AM)Blacknite08 Wrote: If there's good recording software that's less demanding than Fraps, you might be able to get better results.

If it's doing CPU encoding, then yeah it'll take a *lot* of cpu power. Can you try using the amd hardware accelerated gpu encoding instead (ReLive I think is the brand name)?

[Blacknite08]

(09-12-2017, 07:15 AM)JonnyH Wrote: If it's doing CPU encoding, then yeah it'll take a *lot* of cpu power. Can you try using the amd hardware accelerated gpu encoding instead (ReLive I think is the brand name)?

Yeah that worked better. Still got framerate drops in the same places as the Fraps recording but I was able to record the footage at my native resolution 1600 x 900 with ReLive. But I'm not sure if showing this will do much good for the OP if they're using an Nvidia graphics card.

[JonnyH]

(09-12-2017, 09:16 AM)Blacknite08 Wrote: But I'm not sure if showing this will do much good for the OP if they're using an Nvidia graphics card.

NVidia's equivalent is called shadowplay - if the slowdown was caused by CPU encoding it should help similarly.

[stebbinsd]

(09-11-2017, 11:27 PM)JosJuice Wrote: Typically, when you want to turn a recorded DTM into a video file, you would use Dolphin's built-in video dumping feature, since that will let the output file run at 100% speed even if you get lag while Dolphin is playing back the DTM. I would suggest using 5.0 at the very least if you're going to do this, since the 4.0-era builds don't have proper audio/video sync when dumping. Using a development build would be even better than 5.0 because the dumping performance was improved after 5.0.

I downloaded Version 5.0 and tried to bring up the DTM file again. But it just gives me an error message when I do.

I'm attaching a snip of the error message so you can see it for yourself.

[JosJuice]

(09-15-2017, 10:59 PM)stebbinsd Wrote: I downloaded Version 5.0 and tried to bring up the DTM file again. But it just gives me an error message when I do.

I'm attaching a snip of the error message so you can see it for yourself.

Was the DTM file recorded in 5.0? If not, it's not going to work. I'm not sure why you're getting that error message, but even if you solve the error message, DTM files do not sync when played back in Dolphin versions that differ significantly.