Hi-Res Textures causing slowdown (remedy?)

[Suprvgeta]

My PC is capable of running any game w/ pretty high settings (See signature for PC components) w/out any kind of slowdown, however when I load custom textures, there is pretty noticeable slowdown, and graphical hiccups. Furthermore, for the most part, I can only get the custom textures to load correctly when using D3D9 (deprecated) on the safest texture caching setting. D3D11 will not work at all (some textures do load on safest setting, but not all of them). Super Mario Galaxy is what I've most recently tested on. All of the hi-res texture projects look great, but I find myself playing w/ just standard textures so the games run smoothly. I am using Dolphin 4.0.1.

Is it to be expected that there will always be some kind of slowdown when running a game and loading custom hi-res textures, or is this a problem that can be remedied somehow in the settings? Thank you in advance!

[pauldacheez]

Try OpenGL on a current dev build, there's been a recent change that basically amounts to a free speedup on AMD GPUs (and OpenGL doesn't have any custom texture issues, AFAIK). (Also, overclock more, higher texcache accuracy requires a faster CPU.)

[Suprvgeta]

(12-05-2013, 02:20 PM)pauldacheez Wrote: Try OpenGL on a current dev build, there's been a recent change that basically amounts to a free speedup on AMD GPUs (and OpenGL doesn't have any custom texture issues, AFAIK). (Also, overclock more, higher texcache accuracy requires a faster CPU.)

Thank you for the reply I appreciate it, I'll hopefully have some time to try this out tonight and report back.

Edit - Just tried it out and it is remarkably better using Open GL than Direct 3D11, thanks for the input. I'll look at trying to push to 4.7ghz tomorrow on my overclock.

[Suprvgeta]

I bumped my clock up to 4.6ghz, and could run w/ no glitches on medium texture cache accuracy. This allowed some of the HUD items in Mario Galaxy to run correctly, however all of the world textures, and some of the HUD didn't load. When I go to safest accuracy all of the textures load, but there are still graphical hiccups and slowdown in FPS. I'll have to try some different games, perhaps Mario Galaxy is just one of the more demanding. I haven't done enough testing to know or not.

[pauldacheez]

Super Mario Galaxy is one of the top five demanding games in Dolphin, so speed issues with it shouldn't be unexpected, even on an overclocked high-end CPU. (Protip, overclock more if you can. If you can't, some Arctic Silver 5 is $7, and a better cooler altogether is $30 or $75 depending on your needs. A new CPU/motherboard may or may not be out of the question, but it's kind of a waste to replace a 2500K right now...)

Safe texcache accuracy is required for most texture packs, and having any textures work in lower accuracies is mostly just pure luck for you (there's an actual explanation to this, but I don't wanna bullshit it). OpenMP Texture Decoding might help keep things speedy at higher texcache accuracies, though – try that out. In many cases it just slows stuff down, but I think that may be just when trying to decode too many small textures at a lower accuracy, thus the overhead of spawning threads reduces performance. In this case you've got high-res textures at a high accuracy, so each little thread has more work to do, outweighing the cost of spawning it and increasing the amount of work that can be done simultaneously. (Disclaimer: I don't know exactly how this is implemented and how OpenMP does threading, so don't expect this theory to be correct.)

[AnyOldName3]

People say the texcache needs to be high, but I've never had problems with fast as long as the texture names matched those generated by Dolphin on whatever setting the pack creator used. Theoretically, these should be the same, but they're not.

There are some problems, and there is an issue reporting thread, which I posted to, but neobrain told me off for making useless reports, and then asked me to tell him a list of things, all of which had been in my previous posts. When I reposted them in a tidier manor, he responded with something to the effect of 'Do you really think I've got time to read all of that?', even though I'd posted exactly what he'd asked me to. No-one else bothered doing testing.

[neobrain]

(12-08-2013, 10:37 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: There are some problems, and there is an issue reporting thread, which I posted to, but neobrain told me off for making useless reports, and then asked me to tell him a list of things, all of which had been in my previous posts. When I reposted them in a tidier manor, he responded with something to the effect of 'Do you really think I've got time to read all of that?', even though I'd posted exactly what he'd asked me to. No-one else bothered doing testing.

I have been giving very clear instruction with an even more clear request not to post when one is not willing/able to give clear instructions on how to reproduce or recognize issues. While your first reply was not a one-liner, I still had to figure out everything myself. Then you were gone for a week or sth, and once you got back I couldn't make sense of half of your responses even though I had actually pointed out to you specifically that you were not being clear enough. I still had to ask for everything until you got me tired enough to stop caring.

tl;dr: I couldn't have been clearer on my request, so don't act as if I hadn't warned you. Going around whining like that and twisting facts again will get you a free one week ban.

Also, thanks for wasting my time again.

[Suprvgeta]

(12-08-2013, 08:33 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: Super Mario Galaxy is one of the top five demanding games in Dolphin, so speed issues with it shouldn't be unexpected, even on an overclocked high-end CPU. (Protip, overclock more if you can. If you can't, some Arctic Silver 5 is $7, and a better cooler altogether is $30 or $75 depending on your needs. A new CPU/motherboard may or may not be out of the question, but it's kind of a waste to replace a 2500K right now...)

Safe texcache accuracy is required for most texture packs, and having any textures work in lower accuracies is mostly just pure luck for you (there's an actual explanation to this, but I don't wanna bullshit it). OpenMP Texture Decoding might help keep things speedy at higher texcache accuracies, though – try that out. In many cases it just slows stuff down, but I think that may be just when trying to decode too many small textures at a lower accuracy, thus the overhead of spawning threads reduces performance. In this case you've got high-res textures at a high accuracy, so each little thread has more work to do, outweighing the cost of spawning it and increasing the amount of work that can be done simultaneously. (Disclaimer: I don't know exactly how this is implemented and how OpenMP does threading, so don't expect this theory to be correct.)

I actually already have some Arctic Silver 5 and a Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo installed . It has been about 1.5 yrs since I applied it though. I might need to re-apply some AS and the HSF to get better heat reduction. I was able to OC to 4.7 and boot and run some stuff, and even play Mario Galaxy, but I was less stable. Perhaps I'll mess w/ the voltages a little more, and run a burntest to actually get a stable system at those higher clock speeds.
I will dig more into the settings tonight with the OpenMP Texture Decoding, and try out a couple of different texture packs on less demanding games. Will report back the results.

[Lebada3]

Tried Hi-Res Pack several months. It was a no go mostly. Over 1080p interal res, 2xAA minimum is my standard for running the game.

This game barely ran at 60 fps without texture pack or HUD. Best to forget it imo.

[AnyOldName3]

(12-08-2013, 12:09 PM)neobrain Wrote:

(12-08-2013, 10:37 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: There are some problems, and there is an issue reporting thread, which I posted to, but neobrain told me off for making useless reports, and then asked me to tell him a list of things, all of which had been in my previous posts. When I reposted them in a tidier manor, he responded with something to the effect of 'Do you really think I've got time to read all of that?', even though I'd posted exactly what he'd asked me to. No-one else bothered doing testing.

I have been giving very clear instruction with an even more clear request not to post when one is not willing/able to give clear instructions on how to reproduce or recognize issues. While your first reply was not a one-liner, I still had to figure out everything myself. Then you were gone for a week or sth, and once you got back I couldn't make sense of half of your responses even though I had actually pointed out to you specifically that you were not being clear enough. I still had to ask for everything until you got me tired enough to stop caring.

tl;dr: I couldn't have been clearer on my request, so don't act as if I hadn't warned you. Going around whining like that and twisting facts again will get you a free one week ban.

Also, thanks for wasting my time again.

I said I was going to be gone for a week in the first post. I said in my first post that it is impossible to get a single frame from the game without the high res textures ideally being visible.

I'll try to be concise as you don't seem to enjoy reading things you've read. I'll also leave out any testing from builds other than the most compatible.

The build JMC47 provided works perfectly subject to one condition, when load textures is on, so if it's merged 90% of the problem is fixed.


The one condition: JMC47's build ignores custom textures, instead preferring the vanilla ones when both load and dump textures are turned on. This can be seen on the screen right at the start of the game where it asks you to press A and B simultaneously to start the game. The 'A', 'B' and 'Copyright 2007 Nintendo' should all be replaced, but aren't. The vanilla ones looks obviously upscaled past 2x IR, but the custom ones look sharp up to 4x IR.

Other than 'load custom textures' being checked, these results can be replicated using the stock settings dolphin first starts with or the settings for best speed as in the Performance Guide or these settings adjusted to include any game-specific settings recommended in the wiki page. IR can be set to any value Dolphin allows from its GUI.


This may have been better suited to the other thread, but it's here now.