Getting Stuttering on High End Desktop (SSBB & Mario Kart)

[TheHamburglar]

I am coming to you in a moment of frustration, I've invested in a pretty solid gaming PC, but I'm noticing some pretty consistent stuttering in a few of the games I care most about. In Smash Bros Brawl (both vanilla and project M) there is typically some stuttering at the start of the match, both during the introductions and the first ~half minute of play, after which it seems to become negligible. With Mario Kart, similar problems at the start of a race and minor stutter throughout the race. If I had to guess, I would think this may be attributed more to audio issues than graphics, as I have pretty conservative graphics settings, but any advice you may have is much appreciated.

My Rig
Intel i7-4970K
Nvidia GTX 980 TI
16 GB RAM

My Settings -

Dolphin v. 4.0-9204

Graphics

Backend: Direct3D 11 (I've tried OpenGL with worse results)
Fullscreen Resolution: 1920x1080
V-Sync: Unchecked (I've tried checked as well)
Enhancements Internal Resolution: Auto (Window Size)
Anti-Aliasing: None
Anisotropic Filtering: 1x
Scaled EFB Copy Check
Force Texture Filtering Un-Check
Disable Fog Un-Check
Per Pixel Lighting Check
Widescreen Hack Check
Hacks Skip EFB Access from CPU Un-Check
Ignore Format Changes Check
Store EFB Copies to Texture Only Check
Texture Cache Accuracy: Fast
External Frame Buffer Disable Check
Advanced All Un-Checked

CONFIG

General Enable Dual Core Check Enable
Idle Skipping Check
Enable Cheats Uncheck
CPU Emulator Engine: JIT Recompiler (Recommended) Selected
AUDIO DSP Emulatior Engine: DSP HLE emulation Selected (I've also tried DSP LLE recompiler)
Backend Settings Audio Backend: XAudio2 (I've also tried OpenAL)

I am not sure why this stuttering is still occurring, the bulk of these settings are set to Dolphin's defaults, and it seems that my PC should handle these games no problem. If there are any settings that you would recommend that I change for improved performance. I would be hugely grateful! I apologize if similar questions have been asked before, but in my searching I was unable to find anything that helped me out. If there are any additional settings that I may have left out that could be relevant, please let me know and I will be sure to provide it. Thanks again for the help!

[Helios]

What you're likely hitting is shader compilation. This is because since we're not a game engine, we don't know all the shaders we'll need to generate at the start and have to generate them as they're needed, this results in stuttering until they are compiled. Once compiled, they will stay cached and the stuttering will go away for that game until you either A) update dolphin. B) change OS or C) update your GPU drivers.

There is no way to avoid this.

[JMC47]

This is being worked on though. It should be fixed after 5.0 with the ubershader branch.

[Helios]

It's a good thing we'll never release 5.0 righ-- *gets shot*

[TheHamburglar]

Thanks for the advice, that is great to know that the problem might lessen over time. That would make sense, I pretty recently upgraded my Dolphin version, so maybe that's why the stutter is so noticeable right now. I'll plow through a couple sessions and see how the results look. I'm really excited for the 5.0 release! Thanks for all the hard work

[degasus]

OpenGL stutters are a bit worse in the beginning, but as your OpenGL driver caches shader internally again, it's better if you upgrade dolphin often.
OGL shader compilation with cache hit > D3D shader compilation > OpenGL with cache miss