Getting Resident Evils to play smoothly

[Spunkmajer]

Hi.
Is there any way of getting Resident Evil Remake and Zero to play at a good speed with these specs?

OS X 10.6.4
Intel Core i5 2.66 GHz
8GB DDR3 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
And I've tried many revisions of Native Dolphin SVN Builds

Remake is at best 30fps, (60fps in door opening animations) but there are a lot of slowdowns, especially when animated backgrounds are present.
Zero is just consistenly slow (4-19fps)
Oh, and BGMs don't really work either.

So which is the culprit? My hardware, the emu or both or...?

[MFZ]

Remake is actually designed to run at 30 FPS except in door opening sequences, which should be 60 FPS.

I get slowdowns too ( 20 - 25 FPS ), but only on certain scenes / rooms and it isn't many. The rest is 30 FPS.

I'd say the culprit is the emulator itself. It still has some kinks that are slowin' the game down .

[Xtreme2damax]

You should disable lock threads to cores in the general (core) options. Also post what settings you are using, you should be getting full speed or close to it constantly with your system, possibly even with Copy EFB to Ram enabled. Update to revision 6308 or newer, revision 6288 had a regression that caused some large slowdowns with some games and revision 6308 fixed that.

Also no more than 4x SSAA and leave EFB scale on native for your system. When you start cranking up SSAA and EFB scale it will cause some large slowdowns even on the most powerful hardware today.

[hyperspeed]

For Remake I recommend r6108 with SSE4.2 for you with these configurations.            
RE0 configurations     [attachment=4509]    
For RE0 you need overclocking on your CPU to 3.0GHz or more(But you need to know what you're doing or you can burn burn your CPU or your computer so beware), and recommend r5333 with SSE4.2 (to get fullspeed) or r5774 (slower than r5333) for improvements (SSAA and Internal Resolution EFB Scale)

If you want good music you need the wii version of the two games okay.

Download here http://electrodexs.net/dolphin-emu/default.htm
For Resident Evil 0 Wii r5333 SSE4.2 http://uploading.com/files/8a3afc89/R5333x64_SSE42-FIFO.7z/
r5774 SSE4.2 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MT8EEXIY
For Resident Evil Remake Wii r6108 SSE4.2 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=V0DT675I

[Eraser]

What revision of Dolphin are you currently using?

Only recently I successfully finished Resident Evil Zero on SVN r6286 on a PC with 4 times less RAM and an older videocard (Radeon 2900, to be precise). Framerate was stable 30 FPS all the time (except moments it raised up to 60).

Perhaps your OS is the culprit? 'cause on a hardware like yours, RE0 should practically *fly* on latest revisions.

[Spunkmajer]

Thanks a bunch! But overclocking my mac? I don't think I'll be doing that (or anyone else for that matter).
Anyway, I got REmake (Wii) to play with fewer slowdowns by updating to latest revision SVN 6314. So nice of you to put those configurations up hyperspeed. And the specific revisions too,
even though I don't know what I am supposed to do with the contents of those downloads to get them to work. Any insights?
For now, Zero (tried only the Gc version, trying Wii version later) remains as slow as it ever was, and if overclocking is what's called for, it'll stay that way too, I'm afraid

I just got back to this emulation business, and it's developed quite a bit in few years. My main interest is Resident Evils
and I hope it doesn't take too long for Dolphin to be able to play them perfectly.

Edit: Really Eraser? *fly*? That would be nifty. How exactly would OS X affect my performance? I'm using the latest compiled native revision found here:
http://livefor.free.fr/Dolphin_Snow/

[rodiabloalmeida]

You're on a Mac. So there is not much that you can do. The only thing that came to my mind is to update your graphics card drivers. I know they are rare for a Mac, but maybe yours is outdated. If doing that doesn't help you, then maybe you should try to pull of bootcamp and make a dual boot system, either linux or preferably windows 7. Sorry for the not so helpfull post, but the rest of information you need is provided for the users before me.

Just update your drivers if that is an option. It should do the trick. You CPU is a good one. And about the overclocking thing, don't mess with it. Macs are not made for oc. It's not worth the risc.

[Eraser]

Spunkmajer, unfortunately I'm not specializing in Macs (actually, I hate them like rats ), so the exact reason of slowdown is a mystery to me. I can only guess that OS X poor compatibility with Dolphin is to blame. Like rodiabloalmeida has suggested, try a dual boot OS X/Windows and launch the emulator under Win.

[Spunkmajer]

Hahaa! Everything's hunky dory now. I did what you advised me to: Booted Win7 and updated my drivers and sure enough, both Resi games now run perfectly!
And if I do run into other problems, I at least know where to get great help.
Thanks guys! :d

[Spunkmajer]

On closer inspection, there's some trouble in paradise.
First: the sounds of Remake are a bit delayed. Not much, but enough to be noticeable. Occurs on both GC and Wii ports. Have tried a lot of configurations, but the delay remains.
Second: this one is odd. The first time I booted Zero, it played flawlessly. Solid 30Fps all the time. But after testing a lot of different configurations to repair the sound delay issue on Remake,
Zero has been playing on solid 25fps and 50fps on door animations. Again, I've tried a ton of configurations, but haven't been able to return things to normal. Occurs on both the GC and the Wii port of the game.