Harddrive impact on Dolphin performance

[poweredbykimchi]

I have a question about HDD's impact on emulated games.

I sometimes get sudden drops in FPS (in Skyward Sword) randomly, but revisiting the same area no longer causes that sudden drop. I am speculating that it is a HDD problem because my harddrive has an RPM of 5400 only.

One example of this was when I jumped into the lake/pond in the beginning. FPS drops to about 11 and stays there for about 5 or so seconds, then it proceeds to 30 FPS. I tried jumping off the same place again, but it dosen't cause the sudden drop.

My specs and some screenies of LOZ:SS are listed here:

At first I didn't mind too much since the drop in FPS disappeared anyway, but I guess it doesn't hurt to find out why it's occurring. Thanks!

[Starscream]

You're going to get minor slowdowns until the shader cache saves the first time, after you revisit the same area it will not slowdown anymore.

[Fennecat]

(11-25-2011, 10:47 AM)Starscream Wrote: You're going to get minor slowdowns until the shader cache saves the first time, after you revisit the same area it will not slowdown anymore.

Is there a way to preload everything so it's available in real time and avoid slowdowns/stutters?

[Liquid_drummer]

I have it running on an SSD and I still get it. Skyward Sword is the best of the bunch though and does it much less.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Is there a way to preload everything so it's available in real time and avoid slowdowns/stutters?

What do you mean by "preload everything"? Dolphin is an emulator, so it does whatever the game does. It loads what the game loads when the game wants to load it.

Dolphin sometimes stores compiled shaders in a shader cache so it can reuse them. This is what SS is referring to. Once the shaders are cached performance improves.

[Fennecat]

(11-26-2011, 01:16 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

Quote:Is there a way to preload everything so it's available in real time and avoid slowdowns/stutters?

What do you mean by "preload everything"? Dolphin is an emulator, so it does whatever the game does. It loads what the game loads when the game wants to load it.

Dolphin sometimes stores compiled shaders in a shader cache so it can reuse them. This is what SS is referring to. Once the shaders are cached performance improves.

You're correct. I think it would be convenient to have a speed hack that would cache everything for optimal performance the first time around.

[NaturalViolence]

I don't understand what you mean by that. You can't cache the shaders until they are compiled.

[Fennecat]

(11-26-2011, 01:27 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: I don't understand what you mean by that. You can't cache the shaders until they are compiled.

I mean add the ability to compile them before playing the game.

[NaturalViolence]

????????????????????????WTF

How on earth would we do that?

[Fennecat]

(11-26-2011, 01:53 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

????????????????????????WTF

How on earth would we do that?

Have Dolphin scan the ISO and unpack all shaders into the cache.

But since that would take a while, I'd give each game its own cache so the program would only have to be run once.