How fast does your PC have to be to run TP w/o the hyrule speedhack?

[drhycodan]

I'm on a i7-6700K @ 4.6ghz and I'm still experiencing slowdowns w/o the speedhack.

[haddockd]

I believe the Hyrule Field slowdowns are GPU related and we have the same GPU (980). I have some slowdowns without the hack (they can be quite severe near end game). Is there a pressing reason you are unable to use the speed hack?

[leolam]

You're correct, the slowdown is related to the GPU. You can see this easily if you look in a process viewer; you'll see that the GPU thread is almost maxed out at 100%. IIRC, it has to do with the minimap which is insanely intensive in Hyrule Field.

Normally the only side-effect the speed hack has is that the minimap has weird borders, but other than that, it shouldn't cause any other issues.

[drhycodan]

I just don't like how the minimap looks with the hack on and was curious what kind of hardware you need to run the game w/o the speedhack.

[Aleron Ives]

No such hardware exists yet.

[mbc07]

Well, we wouldn't need the speed hack at all if the underlying bug causing the slowdown were actually fixed. However, it looks like something hard to fix, so, in the meanwhile the speed hack is all we have...

[Xtreme2damax]

I used to have much better speed w/o the speed hack on my overclocked first gen i7 920. With the DX9 backend a while back I was getting 22FPS - 25FPS late in the game, OGL was always slow. Now both OGL and DX11 are slow barely managing around 10FPS - 12FPS give or take a few fps.

Unrelated, my performance in Dolphin as of recent seems to have decreased. Not sure if any recent builds killed performance.

[leolam]

I [...] was curious what kind of hardware you need to run the game w/o the speedhack.

The original GC/Wii hardware manages to run it at full speed without the speedhack. Seriously though, I don't think there's hardware that manages to run the game in Dolphin at full speed without the speed hack… An overclocked i7 6700K is about as good as you can get.
(Hyrule Field runs at 10-15fps for me without the hack on my desktop PC.)

I haven't used Dolphin long enough to be able to tell the difference (first time in 2010, but only really using Dolphin since March 2015), but recent builds have been improving performance for me while fixing issues at the same time (new-zelda-hle for example, emulated CPU perf as the official raytrace benchmark is faster on latest builds).

[mbc07]

The original GC/Wii hardware manages to run it at full speed without the speedhack.

Because it's not experiencing the "bug" Dolphin currently have. As far as I remember from the Hyrule Field Slowdown thread, Zelda TP does something fancy to draw the base map and this operation is very heavy, even on a real GC/Wii, bringing them to its knees. The difference is that this operation is executed only once (during the transition to the new area -- so you can't notice) and then the game "flag" this somewhere. Then, if the flag is present the game will only update the cursor instead of redrawing the entire minimap and so, no slowdowns, you don't notice anything on the console. However, in Dolphin we lack something required to keep this "flag" and so the game will redraw the entire map every single frame and thus we get the slowdown in Hyrule Field (which is the biggest area in the game, so it have the biggest map). Also, if your computer is very weak you can also experience this same issue when you're in Faron Woods.

Then it enters the speed hack. In its initial version it introduced a threshold somewhere in Dolphin code, when a specific operation used to generate the minimap was called more than that threshold, Dolphin assumed we were on Hyrule Field and would skip those further calls. However, this could also cause issues in other games if the option was enabled, and so, during some cleanups/accuracy improvements the hack was completely removed from Dolphin's source. And that's where the second version of the speed hack (what we have currently) kicked in: the devs made an AR code specifically for Zelda TP that hooked into some game operations responsible to rendering the minimap and made those operations do nothing. It brought the speed back but resulted in the side effects of the minimap looking slightly different, as you already noticed.

(disclaimer: I'm not a dev, just a long-time contributor, so, take what I said with a grain of salt, it may have some wrong info)

[leolam]

So if I understand correctly, the current hack just no-op's the intensive operations, so the map is still redrawn on every frame but it's less painful. I remember I read this some time ago either on the wiki, blog or on the forum, and it was possibly even explained by you, but I couldn't find back a link to that post/page. Anyway, as far as I remember the posts I've read, you're absolutely correct with your explanation. Thanks for clearly re-explaining it.

As for my reply, I was simply replying to OP's question (what hardware can run the game without the speedhack). And the answer is currently only the original GC/Wii which does not have to emulate the game (and is not as such affected by the bug, as you've said)