Horrific performance in Skies of Arcadia despite low usage?

[Omen267901]

Title. Basically, I'm having absolutely atrocious performance in Skies of Arcadia Legends. Averaging just barely 30 and frequently dropping into the 20s, barely staying above 12 on Shrine Island.

I don't understand why this is happening, as according to the wiki a VERY similar build to mine gets buttery smooth performance nearly maxed-out.

Also, according to task manager dolphin is only pulling about 30% of my CPU and 35% of my memory. Is it stopping itself from pulling as much as it needs for some reason?

I can get screenshots of anything needed, just don't have them atm.

As for other games? This is my first game with dolphin 5.0. Back when I used 4.0.7 I had serious issues similar to this with Wind Waker.

[JosJuice]

Your profile says your CPU has 6 cores, so 17% CPU usage would be equivalent to using one core fully, and 33% would be two cores. Dolphin can't use as many cores as you'd like – in fact, that it manages to use two cores almost fully is better than what might be expected.

There is no version 4.0.7 of Dolphin.

EDIT: I took a look at the wiki page, and I couldn't find any build that's like yours. There is one with the same GPU as you, but "Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.5GHz" is not at all similar to your CPU.

[admin89]

Quote:according to task manager dolphin is only pulling about 30% of my CPU and 35% of my memory. Is it stopping itself from pulling as much as it needs for some reason?

Dolphin is a dual core application . So the CPU that has the fastest single core performance will run Dolphin extremely well
Unfortunately , AMD's single core performance is really poor ...
https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#which-cpu-should-i-use
I have AMD A10 6790k , I had to push it to 5.0GHz to use Dolphin and even so , it's still not fast enough for a specific game (The Last Story)
Overclocking is the only choice if you want more speed for free , 4.4GHz is the sweet spot if you have a decent cooler. Otherwise , I would suggest you should switch to Intel (i3 6100 or i5 6600k for example) or wait for the new AMD Zen (only if AMD keep their promise)

[Omen267901]

(11-28-2016, 02:41 AM)admin89 Wrote: Dolphin is a dual core application . So the CPU that has the fastest single core performance will run Dolphin extremely well
Unfortunately , AMD's single core performance is really poor ...
https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#which-cpu-should-i-use
I have AMD A10 6790k , I had to push it to 5.0GHz to use Dolphin and even so , it's still not fast enough for a specific game (The Last Story)
Overclocking is the only choice if you want more speed for free , 4.4GHz is the sweet spot if you have a decent cooler. Otherwise , I would suggest you should switch to Intel (i3 6100 or i5 6600k for example)  or wait for the new AMD Zen (only if AMD keep their promise)

So I suppose that means I can't get better performance because lol amd. oh well. This PC is custom built, but I bought it from someone else who built it. I think the CPU is already OC'd, as it commonly goes above 3.5 despite that supposedly being the max.

And whoops about 4.0.7, meant to put 4.0.2, was typing this half asleep and was thinking of a different program. 

[JMC47]

Well, wait. There was an issue a while ago with Skies of Arcadia where performance on it dropped for no reason. Can you bisect to when the performance dropped? I'm guessing it will be around when SyncGPU was turned on for the game.

[Omen267901]

(11-29-2016, 08:45 AM)JMC47 Wrote: Well, wait.  There was an issue a while ago with Skies of Arcadia where performance on it dropped for no reason.  Can you bisect to when the performance dropped?  I'm guessing it will be around when SyncGPU was turned on for the game.

I'm not entirely sure, and I don't know what you mean by bisect. The performance issues are literally there in the opening cutscene.

[DJBarry004]

(11-30-2016, 07:36 AM)Omen267901 Wrote: I'm not entirely sure, and I don't know what you mean by bisect. The performance issues are literally there in the opening cutscene.

Bisect means testing a group of both newer and older builds than the on you have, until you find the build that started the issue.

I rememeber someone having developed an automated tool for this.

[leolam]

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-green-notice-development-thread-unofficial-dolphin-bisection-tool-for-finding-broken-builds

Other users (Linux/macOS) can directly use git bisect instead.