Having massive lag and glitch problems

[SkiesforPies]

After setting up Dolphin so far everything runs smoothly, however, trying out my first game(F-Zero GX for gamecube) I am already encountering a problem here and no amount of settings I alter fixes it, nor did any google research give me anything usefull either.



The problem is: Glitches that also affect the sound, the entire picture and sound glitches at random, even when I am only in the menu and nothing happens much. But here it is very low and bearable. Same goes for single races.

However, as soon as I engage in multi races against computers there is quite massive and annoying glitching going on. It´s more worse on some tracks then on others for some reason, and those do not appear to be graphically the most advanced or performance consuming tracks either.

I experimented with pretty much everything, did a google search and tried some tricks, nothing really helps. What I noticed so far:


Altering the frame rate from 0 up to 9 reduces the glitches a bit, but they still persist.

Enabling XFB also seems to help a bit but again no mircale cure.

Medium LLE seems to work best, anything else produces extreme and massive glitch lag. Same for audiobackend. No output results in massive lag, X2E seems to work best, OpenGL works good as well but seems to work not as good as X2E. Changing the CPU emulator engine to anything else the JIT also results in massive lag automatically.

Paradoxically enough deactivating anti-alliasing doesn´t work, but SSAA anti-aliasing results in massive lags. Changing the resolution has no effect at all. Changing internal resolution can also lead to more massive and extreme glitches. Auto as well as 3x Native work best, standard native results in massive glitches again. In case of backend Direct3D11 works best, OpenGL works very good but seems again to have a bit more glitches, software renderer results in massive glitching.


Also given my computer specs it is appears to be clear that this is not a performance problem, but a problem of some other nature. Also if it were so reducing resolution, aliasing and other performance consuming options would make it better, but alas, it doesn´t. In fact using 2x MSAA seems to work best. I also tried myself through pretty much all various settings.

Putting up a BIOS and having that unchecked(of course) also didn´t make any change either.

I am at the end of my wisdom here... Playing is unbearable at this rate and it ruins any fun. Does anyone have any ideas or helpfull tips for me that I could try?

[KHg8m3r]

When you say glitches, do you mean the screen displays rand om and wrong colors, or that the game seems to halt for a second?

[leolam]

I doubt OP meant real glitches. I think he meant slowdowns.

Also given my computer specs it is appears to be clear that this is not a performance problem

Your CPU actually isn't that good, as it has weak single-thread performance. It isn't that bad but will still limit you in more demanding games or during demanding parts.

[JMC47]

Your processor is too weak to play F-Zero GX at full speed.

[admin89]

F-Zero is a very demanding game that needs a beefy PC to run full speed . Why is that ? With default settings (game.ini) , Dual Core mode is disabled and force you to run game in single core mode
You can re-enable dual core mode by right-click the game - Properties . Sure you will gain double speed but the game may reset randomly

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=F-Zero_GX

You could try Directx12 as it is much faster than any back end right now . Unfortunately , your GTX 460 is Fermi which is unsupported . So no luck with that unless you upgrade the GPU
Your only option left is to upgrade the CPU . If you're on a budget , G3258 ($70) + Asrock Z97 Anniversary ($94) should be a good choice . G3258 is Haswell . At stock speed 3.2GHz , it's twice as fast as Phenom xII 3.2GHz . If you overclock it to 4.6GHz , it will be triple as fast as that Phenom in Dolphin Benchmark
If you don't want to overclock , you can spend money on i3 6100 @ 3.7GHz and H110M mobo

[SkiesforPies]

Nope actual glitches that halt the game for a second or so.

Hmmm I see, I wouldn´t have thought that F-Zero GX is that demanding, guess it is then.

As it appears, Dual Core is already enabled in the games property settings sadly enough.

Wait.... I need windows 10 for DirectX12? Because currently I am running in Windows 7 and am pretty reluctant to upgrade to Windows 10 since multiple other people warned me about windows 10 beeing slow, crashing a lot and making it impossible to find anything due to an app based design. So it is not possible to run on DirectX12 with windows 7?

[leolam]

Those are not glitches then, really just slowdowns because of your slow CPU.

Yes, you really need Windows 10 for DX12. Though if your CPU is the bottleneck, I think that even DX12 will not improve your performance a lot…

[JosJuice]

Your first posts says that you're using LLE. Could you try HLE instead? It should be faster.

Nope actual glitches that halt the game for a second or so.

The game halting for a second or so is slowdown/stuttering, not a glitch.

Wait.... I need windows 10 for DirectX12? Because currently I am running in Windows 7 and am pretty reluctant to upgrade to Windows 10 since multiple other people warned me about windows 10 beeing slow, crashing a lot and making it impossible to find anything due to an app based design. So it is not possible to run on DirectX12 with windows 7?

You need Windows 10 for DirectX 12, yes. Based on what admin89 says, it doesn't sound like there's much point in trying, though.

[SkiesforPies]

Using HLE paradoxically enough makes the lagging worse.

And meh that sucks... I guess I will go for a better GPU in that case.

Disabling Synchronisation of the GPU thread made it a lot better but there still is lag, also it crashed once after an hour(as expected that this could happen). There is definitely no getting around getting a better GPU in this case. Thanks for the help everyone.

Oh and lastly since I forgot to ask: What exactly is Fermi?

[leolam]

That's weird, because HLE is much less demanding than LLE…

Using a better GPU will not help you a lot. What you need to change, if you want to have an enjoyable experience, is your CPU. (Avoid AMD CPUs.) That means you'll also have to change your motherboard.

Fermi is your current GPU's architecture.