Intermittent stuttering - time for a new GPU?

[Eleo]

You can see my specs in my sig.

I have tried to play both Umbrella Chronicles and Other M with "random" stuttering. For example, first level of Umbrella Chronicles things are going fine until the camera does a 180; as it does this the game stutters spectacularly. In Other M I played the opening part where the guy walks you through your abilities; the framerate is solid basically until I perform one of these abilities for the first time. First time I use the charge beam = stutter, first time I wall-jump = stutter. Goes from very slight to horrible.

My specs are good, I can only guess my 8800GT is a bottleneck. Now, I've been using it for years and with my system I can even run pretty recent PC games at high (but not maximum) settings, so there's been no real desire to upgrade. I'm guessing emulation doesn't play by the same rules in that none of this stuff is optimized to perform on a PC. It almost seems like loading the assets for new areas taxes the card too hard either CPU-wise or memory wise, but I don't know for sure. I definitely don't want to purchase a new card and get the same stuttering problems because it's actually some other aspect of my system.

When it's not stuttering, things are smooth, the framerate peaks, even with AA enabled. It's just that with high settings, when the games do stutter, they stutter worse than they would with lower settings.

Seems logical that it's probably my graphics card, but I'd like to get more opinions before I run out and buy a more recent card. I'm not against investing in this. I would buy a Wii outright if it did at least 720p but I've seen it on large TVs and it generally looks pretty bad; I cannot justify the $200 price tag of a sub-HD console.

[Link_to_the_past]

Your card although a bit old is decent. I would suggest if you buy a new one to be at least a GTX 460 to have a noticable improvement. Don't go with slower models as the difference won't be very big compared to your current card.

[Eleo]

Yeah I was looking at a superclocked 1GB 460 for a good $200. Maybe more VRAM is what I need, I don't know. Like I said the game framerate maxes outside of certain scenarios, like when the camera pans really quickly or I'm entering a new area. Just wanted to be sure it was the graphics card. Almost seems like everything would be perfect if the emulator were a little more optimized, but there's a lot of games I'd like to play and I don't feel like waiting.

[NaturalViolence]

What resolution and settings are you using? An 8800GT should be fine with nearly any settings and resolution so I would not advise getting a new gpu for dolphin since you will likely see no improvement whatsoever. Since it's stuttering not general fps issues it most likely is not the gpu, that would either be caused by a cpu timing slowdown, slow texture decoding, or slow texture streaming. Do you have opencl turned on and what type of HDD are you using to load the game?

Does the stuttering exist in all video plugins or just one?

[Vidar]

I too have stuttering problems with most games no matter what plugin, especially the DX11 one which makes some games nearly unplayable (sonic colours).
Could it be the overclock?

Another examples: Fighting a ghost in Fatal Frame 4, sonic showing up after booting up the game (where he runs from right to left)

[skid]

Dolphin has to translate the graphics commands of the Wii into graphics commands that the video card in your PC can understand. The emulator does this in the middle of the game. In the DX9 plugin, it'll cache the result by saving it to your hard disk. This process introduces small stutters mid game. It occurs for everybody. The DirectX plugins are especially affected because the DirectX translation (of shaders) is slower than the one in OpenGL.

Just fyi, before you drop $300 on something that does not do what you expect.

[Vidar]

Good, glad to know that it's normal.

[franciz]

(11-29-2010, 08:06 AM)skid Wrote: The emulator does this in the middle of the game. In the DX9 plugin, it'll cache the result by saving it to your hard disk. This process introduces small stutters mid game. It occurs for everybody.

If the hard disk is the bottleneck, then this stuttering can be removed using Virtual Ramdisk???

[Eleo]

(11-29-2010, 05:49 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: What resolution and settings are you using? An 8800GT should be fine with nearly any settings and resolution so I would not advise getting a new gpu for dolphin since you will likely see no improvement whatsoever. Since it's stuttering not general fps issues it most likely is not the gpu, that would either be caused by a cpu timing slowdown, slow texture decoding, or slow texture streaming. Do you have opencl turned on and what type of HDD are you using to load the game?

Does the stuttering exist in all video plugins or just one?

Initially it was 720p, but I lowered it down to as low as 640x480. That improves how quickly the stuttering is resolved but doesn't eliminate it.

Also my C: is a dual SSD Raid 0 configuration. I event went so far as to copy the image to the C: drive but that didn't make a different what so ever.

I tried with OpenCL off and on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUP1zEOuV78 This guy experiences no stuttering and has more or less the same specs as I do. I can identify multiple parts of that video where it stutters for me where it is completely smooth for him. I even went so far as to download the same SVN build.

[Eleo]

A benchmark of my hard drives shows way lower write speeds than I should be getting. My 5400RPM HDDs are getting faster write speeds apparently. I had a feeling the problem wasn't the graphics card but didn't know what else it could be. I'll look into this problem I guess.