Hyrule Field Slowdown Observation

[StripTheSoul]

another problem is some people not being honest or just stupid...some just don't get it that the slowdowns only appear later in the game, e.g.

[NaturalViolence]

Well when I started the benchmark project a lot of people signed up but when I told them I was going to put it on hold for a month everyone left and forgot about it so it ended up just being me and JADS. I have the issue, jads doesn't. We're both using windows 7 x64. I'm using a q6600 OCed to 3.2GHz with 4GB of ddr2 800 ram and a GTX 260 C216 running forceware 197. JADS is using a core i7 860 OCed to 3.5GHz with 4GB of ddr3 1600 ram and a 5850 with catalyst 10.5.

What's more interesting was the huge speedup JADS was getting from enabling a 3rd core (50% increase in framerate!). While I had almost no difference between 2 and 3 cores enabled. And I made sure he didn't have any unnecessary background processes running. http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/thread-7749-page-12.html?highlight=benchmarking
Read through pages 11 and 12. We stopped doing this about a month ago though. I think I'm going to start the benchmarking project back up next spring and try again when I actually have time. And hopefully by then we'll have at least 1 more official release.

[Xtreme2damax]

Thanks NV, btw this issue could also be limited to select cards, not necessarily a driver issue. There could be some bug with certain cards and the way they behave with graphics rendering in Dolphin. There's any number of things that could be causing it, we just need to find what is responsible.

[jakeslogan]

Look like FPS in Hyrule field getting more worse near the end of the game.
I've just played the game again, and the first time i reach Hyrule field my FPS range from 25-27. When i reached Hyrule Field north of Kakariko Village it dropped down to 20-22 FPS. But if I load my old save game(saved before entering Hyrule castle for FINAL BOSS fight) then go to Hyrule field(any), FPS becomes more and more worse, only 15-17 FPS.

my rig:
CPU E2180 @ 2.66Ghz
Main ECS 945GCT-M2/1333
RAM 2x1Gb DDR2
VGA ATI HD4650 GDDR4 256mb

Edit: Im using r5475 patched by Xtreme.

[obscured]

How far in the game is Hyrule field? I recently got into Dolphin gaming and still playing Wind Waker. I have a pretty strong machine and can give feed back about it.

E8500 4.3ghz
8800 GTS 512 which I can oc for performance gains.

Or someone link me to a save.

[obscured]

Okay, I've tried the SVN5030 with the patch in this thread and I'm getting 85-95% speed fps 28 vps 58 (barely notice slowdown). This is 1680 x 1050 16xQ CSAA with all the filters on.
Here is a link of a print screen with my stats highlighted bottom left.

http://yfrog.com/mr51372407j

http://yfrog.com/jdtp2tj

Almost full speed.

Edit: In a bid to see if I can achieve full speed I oced my gpu pretty far with no gain. I believe its a emulation bottleneck again here again.

[Xtreme2damax]

I did some comparing of SMG2 on the actual hardware and Dolphin, I discovered something surprising. On the real hardware distant and off screen objects and parts of the level are culled, meaning they don't get rendered. I discovered that Dolphin currently doesn't support culling, everything in the entire level/area is being rendered at one time, hence these performance issues. The slowdowns are more prominent in large areas such as Hyrule Field and areas with a lot of enemies, would also explain slowdowns in some parts of Resident Evil 4 and why when the enemies are killed, the framerate increases.

I'm quite surprised Dolphin does as well as it does without culling support. Another thing, strong gpu's might be able to compensate for the lack of culling support in Dolphin, hence why some Dolphin users are unaffected by the Hyrule Field slowdown issue.

http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/thread-10188.html

[StripTheSoul]

that's indeed interesting...I'm especially surprised this hasn't come up yet ^^
would it be possible to implement culling in Dolphin? I guess it'd be quite complicated, eh?

EDIT: Hm, however, if this was a culling/no culling thing, why then do games run faster when you run towards a wall, for example (so that there's not much going on on the screen)...?

[Xtreme2damax]

(06-21-2010, 12:39 AM)StripTheSoul Wrote: that's indeed interesting...I'm especially surprised this hasn't come up yet ^^
would it be possible to implement culling in Dolphin? I guess it'd be quite complicated, eh?

EDIT: Hm, however, if this was a culling/no culling thing, why then do games run faster when you run towards a wall, for example (so that there's not much going on on the screen)...?

Perhaps there is another reason for your speed increase? I know whether I am facing away from Hyrule Field or look down at the ground, Hyrule Field is just as slow, suggesting that everything is being rendered at once instead of culling the distant geometry.

Well according to XTra.KrazzY, culling support exists and appears to work, perhaps the implementation is wrong or there is still something that is unsupported?

XTra.KrazzY Wrote:Just as I suspected. Culling exists and works.
As I said before, it might be either Occlusion Culling or Viewing Frustum Culling.

I always thought the software handled it by not sending the vertices to the GPU, but it turns out that it's not so. Maybe there are BP calls for maximum length rendering?

Now the question is how to implement it...

http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/source/detail?r=5708

[kernel64]

Great, at least we have something to think about. In SMG or SMG2, a good cpu manages to achieve close to full speed frame rates, even on complex levels. Hyrule field is very slow even on this kind of cpus. Being a GC game, it might be handling Hyrule field in a different way. Maybe that's why Dolphin apparently loads and renders the entire Hyrule field.