Gamecube games constantly stopping

[nikoo]

Hello.

Ever since around Dolphin 3.5 all gamecube games have started acting strange, as in every few seconds the emulation stops completely for less than half a second and then resumes in fullspeed, even though FPS stays at max and speed is constantly 100%. I have tried D3D9, 11 and OGL, but the result was the same. The same (or higher settings) for wii games on the same emulator version runs perfectly fluent, though.

I always find myself having to drop down to random 3.0 revisions or sometimes even down to 2.0 revisions to be able to properly play gamecube games.

While it's not the end of the world having to have multiple revisions at hand to play all the games, it would be great to be able to play the majority on the same (latest) build. It just seems so weird to me how it's only been GC games that this happens on, though. Anyone have any idea what could be the cause of this, or is anyone else experiencing this?

My specs are
i5 4670k @ 4.2GHz
GTX760 DC2OC 2GB
8GB DDR3 1600MHz
1680x1050 resolution
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Fullscreen/windowed doesn't appear to change a thing.

[DJBarry004]

Which games? Tried latest build?

[nikoo]

Every game I've tried. Among them have been Mario Party 7, Smash Bros Melee, Resident Evil Zero, REmake and Digimon World 4. All these games work full speed without any problems whatsoever on Dolphin r6882, r7434 and 3.0-751-dirty for example.

Any build I've tried after the official 3.5 release the games stopped running properly. Wii games run perfectly fine on both 4.0 and 4.0.2 but the gamecube games have the halting problem on these.

[KHg8m3r]

Check the MD5 hash sums of your games. Its possible that they are bad rips

More likely, you're some driver somewhere. Check Intel Driver Update, DirectX Web Updater, get the latest version of Visual C++ (x32 and x64), and check Windows Update for any optional updates (besides bing)

Also, which Nvidia driver are you using? The latest one (335.something) can cause some crashes

[nikoo]

Not sure if them being bad rips would have anything to do with the case when all of them work perfectly fine on the older versions.
I updated all my drivers 4 days ago when I moved on to Win7 64-bit. I previously ran WinXP 32-bit and the same problem occurred with newer versions.
I am using 335.23 nvidia driver, but I have not experienced a single crash on any version of Dolphin so far.

It really does not make any sense why this happens. I also tried using LLE (both the one provided by the newer Dolphin versions, as well as dumped ones) but there appeared to be no change in this behaviour.

The main reason I want this issue out of the way is because of netplay. The older versions have terrible netplay compared to the state it is currently in. These constant cutoffs in emulation (even though it's less than a half second pause) makes me desync with the others rather frequently.

Something I noticed is that this whole stutter/lag thing only happens the first time through. For example in Smash Bros Melee, if I watch the entire intro or play a specific stage for the first time I get this constant cutting off thing. The next time I start playing, I can watch the intro without any lag/cutoffs whatsoever and can play the stage(s) I've already played without any lag, but if I select a previously unplayed stage, the whole pause thing occurs throughout the stage.

Could there be some setting I'm overlooking that was implemented somewhere after the official 3.0 release?

Edit: This is now also happening on the older versions that I didn't have any problems with while I was still on WinXP. Once things have been loaded once, they work fine on any version of the emulator, though. This far, this has only occurred while playing gamecube games.

Could the cause be a slow harddrive? But if so, why are wii games unaffected?

[JMC47]

Could be your shader ache not generating properly or something along those lines. In older builds, OGL didn't have a shader cache, so that could explain why older versions work as well.

[nikoo]

That doesn't sound impossible. Would there happen to be a way to fix that?

Edit:
I disabled the global user folder so everything is stored locally in the dolphin folder and moved the games to the same harddrive where Dolphin is installed, and this seems to have fixed the stuttering issue.

Thanks for the help/suggestions!