Getting random, temporary slowdown in all games

[guygizmo]

I'm running Dolphin 5.0 with the following specs:

Intel Core i5 3.5 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
8 GB of RAM
2 TB HDD
Windows 8.1

At seemingly random times, the games I'm playing will slow down. Usually I get a clean 60 FPS, but when it slows down, it typical drops to 30-40 FPS. There may be some kind of pattern to it, as I've noticed it occurring when certain sound effects trigger (like a 1-up sound in Mario Galaxy 2) or when there's a lot of moving objects on screen, but it's not at all consistent. If I keep revisiting a part of a game that has slowdown, sometimes it will happen, and sometimes it won't. It seems to affect every game I play.

When the slowdown occurs, I can usually fix it by doing one of the following:

1. Pause the game or go to the Wii paused menu by pressing the home button, and waiting for the FPS to return to 60
2. Toggle frame skip for about one second
3. Save and load a save state

Please note that when I use frameskip to clear up the problem, the game will usually start running *faster* than 60 fps. And sometimes loading a save state triggers the issue.

My specs should be fast enough to run these games at full speed, particularly given people report playing all of the games I've seen this happen in at full speed with specs much worse than mine. Furthermore, the fact that doing something like toggling frameskip clears the problem up suggests that it's not that my system isn't fast enough.

Is there anything I can do to clear this up? 98% of the time Dolphin works flawlessly but these few incidents are quite annoying and take me out of the game.

[JMC47]

It sounds like something in the background is stealing some CPU power, especially if the Wii Home Menu is still laggy (it's incredibly lightweight) while you wait for it to get back up to full speed.

[guygizmo]

Possible, although nothing much is running in the background other than Steam and GameEx. (No anti-virus, no updates, active backups, or things like that.)

Also, the Wii Home menu isn't laggy. I open it because it usually clears up the FPS issue within a second or two. These was one instance where it didn't, though, and I had to try a different method.

Another thing I've noticed frequently triggers this issue: getting star bits in Mario Galaxy 2. It's not consistent at all, and the times where that's triggered it was when there was a lot of other stuff happening on screen *and* I picked up dozens of star bits at once.

I should mention that I've already checked the Dolphin wiki for Super Mario Galaxy 2 and have both "Enable Speaker Data" and "Skip EFB Access from CPU" turned off.

[Craftyawesome]

Check your temps I guess?

[guygizmo]

Check your temps I guess?

Sorry for the newb question but what do you mean by temps?

[envisaged0ne]

Check the temperature that your CPU & GPU are running at while you're experiencing those slowdowns

[guygizmo]

Check the temperature that your CPU & GPU are running at while you're experiencing those slowdowns

Duhh, of course. For some reason I was interpreting "temps" as "temporary data" or caches or something like that.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure my temperatures are nominal when running Dolphin but I'll double check just to be sure.

In the meantime, does anyone else have any other ideas?

[User0001]

Does it only happen in Dolphin? If not, maybe try a later development build and if the problem still persists, it is likely some hardware or process-related issue.

[guygizmo]

Update: I found a section of Mario Galaxy 2 that consistently causes the slowdown, so I decided to try fiddling with Dolphin's settings to see which if any had an effect.

First, turning off "Store EFB copies to texture only" made a big difference. Instead of the gaming sporadically slowing down to 30-40 fps for an indefinite period of time (i.e. until I paused or toggled frame skip), it would briefly hiccup and drop to 30-40 fps for a fraction of a second. It looks like having this setting enabled would cause any slowdown I experience to be long and drawn out, instead of a momentary blip. Not sure why that is, but I'm going to leave that off for now.

Second, I noticed that most of the hiccups and brief slowdowns corresponded to certain sound effects, so I changed the DSP Emulator Engine from "DSP LLE recompiler" to "DSP HLE Emulator". Now the hiccups and slowdowns are almost entirely gone.

However, they're not *completely* gone. There's still a few places in Mario Galaxy 2 (and probably other games as well) that drop below 60 fps, for example the introduction screen and animation of Mario Galaxy 2 doesn't play at a smooth 60 fps. I'll keep playing and seeing how Dolphin performs. But it may be that those two settings cleared up the vast majority of the issues for me.

Also, using a later version of Dolphin (5.0.3036) actually made the performance much worse overall. So I'll stick with 5.0.

[DJBarry004]

I tried to look up your exact CPU model, since you didn´t specify it entirely. Judging from the base clock I found out that you could have either the 4690K or the 6600K.

On either case, your CPU shouldn´t be the problem.

Could you also make sure you didn´t touch the CPU clock override option?