[GC] Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader

Visor

(04-04-2019, 03:56 PM)BlizzardToaBreeze Wrote: Hi all, I was wondering if the new Unification of VideoCommon was good news for Factor 5 games like RS2. Does anyone have insight into whether we could expect speedups on the horizon because of this?

I don't believe the Unification updates specifically made any improvements for the Rogue Squadron games, but I recently updated Dolphin to its latest build as of this writing (5.0-9888) in search of better performance, and surprisingly I can now run the game at pretty much a stable 60fps using Direct3D 11 at 3x native resolution and the CPU Override option now disabled (even in the Hoth stage, which now only has the occasional stutter along with slowing down a bit during certain cut scenes). This is on my aging i5 3570K setup that's overclocked to 4.8 GHz.

I left most of Dolphin's settings at default, but under your Graphics Configuration's Shader Compilation section you'll want to choose ~~"Synchronous (Ubershaders)"~~ "Asynchronous (Upbershaders)" and enable the "Compile Shaders Before Starting" option, which will pre-compile all the shaders for you on the first run (and it won't have to compile them again until you either upgrade Dolphin, change your internal resolution, or sometimes when upgrading your video card's drivers). This will eliminate most of the stuttering in the game.

If you want to squeeze out a bit more performance then you can enable the "Skip EFB Access from CPU" hack either globally (which could be a bit risky) via the Graphics Config -> Hacks window, or preferably on a per-game basis by typing "EFBAccessEnable = False" in the game's .ini file. BTW, if you don't know how to do this, just go to your list of games in the main Dolphin page, right-click on Rogue Leader and select Properties. Then click on the Editor tab and add the following in the User Config text field section in the lower part of the window:

[Video_Hacks]
EFBAccessEnable = False

I also enabled the "Speed up Disc Transfer Rate" option, which loads the game's stages much faster. For this option, once again just go to your list of games in the main Dolphin page, right-click on Rogue Leader and select Properties. Under the General tab, "Speed up Disk Transfer Rate" is an option that you can enable (make sure the actual check-mark is shown instead of the little black box).

Now if only RS3: Rebel Strike would work properly with these newer Dolphin versions... Sad

That being said, I have some new settings for that game using older versions of Dolphin, so be sure to check out that game's thread. Smile

(12-25-2018, 05:16 AM)pantonio717 Wrote: I'm assuming you all don't play with the widescreen Gecko code? Because it crashes every time and for the folks that have addressed it they don't get any responses.

I've been playing with the widescreen Gecko code without any issues. This is how the code looks in my .ini file:

[Video_Settings]
AspectRatio = 1

[Gecko]
$Widescreen
48000000 800AC1C0
DE000000 7E007FFF
3016B380 38600020
14014D08 4848B2F8
1416B378 48334C99
140DB618 483C49F9
141F6F78 3FE38E39
E0000000 80008000
060A0000 00000038
C0C20000 EC2101B2
D023012C 4BB74D00
C0220000 C0030000
EC000824 D0030000
C003000C EC000824
D003000C 38800001
4E800020 00000000
0409EA20 3FAAAAAA
48000000 80096220
DE000000 80008180
14000E84 3B19999A
14000E90 BF400000
E0000000 80008000
0409935C 3FE38E39
*
[Gecko_Enabled]
$Widescreen

**JosJuice** · 04-08-2019, 04:23 PM **#1,622**

(04-08-2019, 12:13 PM)Visor Wrote: under your Graphics Configuration's Shader Compilation section you'll want to choose "Synchronous (Ubershaders)"

I would not suggest this, it's very slow. Normally you would want to use asynchronous ubershaders instead. If you're using it with an Nvidia GPU, you have to keep in mind that it only gets rid of stuttering on some video backends, but you should be fine since you said you already were using Direct3D 11.

Visor · 04-08-2019, 05:02 PM **#1,623**

(04-08-2019, 04:23 PM)JosJuice Wrote: I would not suggest this, it's very slow. Normally you would want to use asynchronous ubershaders instead. If you're using it with an Nvidia GPU, you have to keep in mind that it only gets rid of stuttering on some video backends, but you should be fine since you said you already were using Direct3D 11.

Very interesting. For some reason, I thought that enabling the "Compile Shaders Before Starting" option would've just loaded all UberShaders, and the other options wouldn't have mattered as much. But if there is still a difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous in regards to performance, then I'll update my post above to use Asynchronous instead.

Thanks a bunch!
Visor

**JosJuice** · 04-08-2019, 05:12 PM **#1,624**

(04-08-2019, 05:02 PM)Visor Wrote: Very interesting. For some reason, I thought that enabling the "Compile Shaders Before Starting" option would've just loaded all UberShaders, and the other options wouldn't have mattered as much.

The performance impact from synchronous ubershaders is not because of the compile time, but the time it takes to execute the shaders, and Dolphin has to execute the shaders the whole time that you're running the game.

04-10-2019, 04:24 AM **#1,625**

How is anyone actually playing this game at the moment?

You can't activate the targeting computer without it hanging a few seconds later.

dark2792 · 04-14-2019, 06:37 PM **#1,626**

(04-08-2019, 12:13 PM)Visor Wrote: I don't believe the Unification updates specifically made any improvements for the Rogue Squadron games, but I recently updated Dolphin to its latest build as of this writing (5.0-9888) in search of better performance, and surprisingly I can now run the game at pretty much a stable 60fps using Direct3D 11 at 3x native resolution and the CPU Override option now disabled (even in the Hoth stage, which now only has the occasional stutter along with slowing down a bit during certain cut scenes). This is on my aging i5 3570K setup that's overclocked to 4.8 GHz.

I left most of Dolphin's settings at default, but under your Graphics Configuration's Shader Compilation section you'll want to choose ~~"Synchronous (Ubershaders)"~~ "Asynchronous (Upbershaders)" and enable the "Compile Shaders Before Starting" option, which will pre-compile all the shaders for you on the first run (and it won't have to compile them again until you either upgrade Dolphin, change your internal resolution, or sometimes when upgrading your video card's drivers). This will eliminate most of the stuttering in the game.

If you want to squeeze out a bit more performance then you can enable the "Skip EFB Access from CPU" hack either globally (which could be a bit risky) via the Graphics Config -> Hacks window, or preferably on a per-game basis by typing "EFBAccessEnable = False" in the game's .ini file. BTW, if you don't know how to do this, just go to your list of games in the main Dolphin page, right-click on Rogue Leader and select Properties. Then click on the Editor tab and add the following in the User Config text field section in the lower part of the window:

[Video_Hacks]
EFBAccessEnable = False

I also enabled the "Speed up Disc Transfer Rate" option, which loads the game's stages much faster. For this option, once again just go to your list of games in the main Dolphin page, right-click on Rogue Leader and select Properties. Under the General tab, "Speed up Disk Transfer Rate" is an option that you can enable (make sure the actual check-mark is shown instead of the little black box).

Now if only RS3: Rebel Strike would work properly with these newer Dolphin versions... That being said, I have some new settings for that game using older versions of Dolphin, so be sure to check out that game's thread.

I've been playing with the widescreen Gecko code without any issues. This is how the code looks in my .ini file:

[Video_Settings]
AspectRatio = 1

[Gecko]
$Widescreen
48000000 800AC1C0
DE000000 7E007FFF
3016B380 38600020
14014D08 4848B2F8
1416B378 48334C99
140DB618 483C49F9
141F6F78 3FE38E39
E0000000 80008000
060A0000 00000038
C0C20000 EC2101B2
D023012C 4BB74D00
C0220000 C0030000
EC000824 D0030000
C003000C EC000824
D003000C 38800001
4E800020 00000000
0409EA20 3FAAAAAA
48000000 80096220
DE000000 80008180
14000E84 3B19999A
14000E90 BF400000
E0000000 80008000
0409935C 3FE38E39
*
[Gecko_Enabled]
$Widescreen

I'm using the same Gecko Code and it crashes for me consistently if it is enabled.

nbohr1more · 04-15-2019, 07:15 PM **#1,627**

Here are my settings:

Code:

[Core]

# Values set here will override the main Dolphin settings.

MMU = 1

OverclockEnable = True

Overclock = 0.68

SyncOnSkipIdle = False

[OnLoad]

# Add memory patches to be loaded once on boot here.

[OnFrame]

# Add memory patches to be applied every frame here.

[ActionReplay]

# Add action replay cheats here.

[Video]

[Video_Settings]

AspectRatio = 1

EnableGPUTextureDecoding = False

[Video_Hacks]

EFBToTextureEnable = True

ImmediateXFBEnable = False

[Video_Enhancements]

ArbitraryMipmapDetection = False

[Gecko]

$Widescreen

48000000 800AC1C0

DE000000 7E007FFF

3016B380 38600020

14014D08 4848B2F8

1416B378 48334C99

140DB618 483C49F9

141F6F78 3FE38E39

E0000000 80008000

060A0000 00000038

C0C20000 EC2101B2

D023012C 4BB74D00

C0220000 C0030000

EC000824 D0030000

C003000C EC000824

D003000C 38800001

4E800020 00000000

0409EA20 3FAAAAAA

48000000 80096220

DE000000 80008180

14000E84 3B19999A

14000E90 BF400000

E0000000 80008000

0409935C 3FE38E39

*

[Gecko_Enabled]

$Widescreen

phil6891 · (This post was last modified: 04-19-2019, 09:28 AM by phil6891.)

Was playing this before on Vengeance on Kotholis, and was wondering why in the same areas on every back-end, the game slows down.
I'm so clued to where these slowdowns occur now, that I can probably point out upcoming slowdowns.

Primarily when panning to switch ships, and facing an island pitch down.

It was mentioned in a monthly feature overview a while back that this was along the lines of CPU syncing and or timing that needing cleaning up in Dolphin, and that devs still don't agree that either of the Rouge games are cleanly playable until this is addressed.

However I wasn't sure if it might be down to the way z-freeze emulation was written and implemented.
Given it was a feature unique to the GameCube's GPU architecture, and the huge undertaking to get it working with traditional PC GPU's to understand and render - something may have to be re-reviewed to see if optimisations can be made.

I could be entirely wrong, and for that I apologise. It just seems odd this would be an CPU code issue.

Spamzilla · 04-29-2019, 11:26 AM **#1,629**

I found a crash when playing this game using the DirectX 12 (but not OpenGL) backend trying to play the Tatooine Training mission.

pantonio717 · (This post was last modified: 05-10-2019, 11:14 PM by pantonio717.)

(04-14-2019, 06:37 PM)dark2792 Wrote: I'm using the same Gecko Code and it crashes for me consistently if it is enabled.

(04-15-2019, 07:15 PM)nbohr1more Wrote: Here are my settings:

Code:

[Core] # Values set here will override the main Dolphin settings. MMU = 1 OverclockEnable = True Overclock = 0.68 SyncOnSkipIdle = False [OnLoad] # Add memory patches to be loaded once on boot here. [OnFrame] # Add memory patches to be applied every frame here. [ActionReplay] # Add action replay cheats here. [Video] [Video_Settings] AspectRatio = 1 EnableGPUTextureDecoding = False [Video_Hacks] EFBToTextureEnable = True ImmediateXFBEnable = False [Video_Enhancements] ArbitraryMipmapDetection = False [Gecko] $Widescreen 48000000 800AC1C0 DE000000 7E007FFF 3016B380 38600020 14014D08 4848B2F8 1416B378 48334C99 140DB618 483C49F9 141F6F78 3FE38E39 E0000000 80008000 060A0000 00000038 C0C20000 EC2101B2 D023012C 4BB74D00 C0220000 C0030000 EC000824 D0030000 C003000C EC000824 D003000C 38800001 4E800020 00000000 0409EA20 3FAAAAAA 48000000 80096220 DE000000 80008180 14000E84 3B19999A 14000E90 BF400000 E0000000 80008000 0409935C 3FE38E39 * [Gecko_Enabled] $Widescreen

I get crashes the same as dark2792 when the widescreen code is enabled. Are you guys using GSWE64 or another one?