Major performance drop between a 3 year old build and 4.0.2

[chango]

Hello!

First of all, a HUGE thank you to all developers for the continued support and enhancements to the most impressive emulator of all time!

I am posting to try to figure out just what exactly I might be overlooking that is causing such performance issues.

My computer stats aren't the most insane, but throughout the years I have had no difficulty getting the vast majority of games to run with 4xAA at 1920x1080 with at least a steady 30fps, a bunch of games run even better.

The last build of Dolphin that I was using as a daily driver was a nearly 3 year old build, r6869. This build plays Wii, WiiWare, VC, and GameCube games more than impressively.

I recently tried the 4.0.2 builds and various dailys all the way up to the 4.0-1038 build.

I am having the most frustrating experience trying to play with these modern versions. Practically every game I've thrown at it gets stuck with audio pops and clicking from the moment it hits the title screen. When the audio stutters for a moment, the gameplay seems to free in sync with the sound stuttering. I can not achieve even a solid 5fps as there seems to be something affecting performance that has changed so drastically that I can not comfortable play at all. So I've begun to troubleshoot everything I can. First I tried running with stock options, and from there I have tried basically every option available both individually and in combination of two or more of the options, each with the same result, virtually no change in the stuttering audio/framerate.

Did something fundamentally change in the way this emulator performs that would require a significant amount more horsepower that would cause me to experience this issue? Is there one option in particular that I might be overlooking that would cause this? When I run my old 3 year old build it runs the games just as great as always, but I'd sure love to figure out what is holding down emulation in the new builds.

Thank you in advance.

[delroth]

3 year old builds will also randomly crash, have bad audio output, graphics rendering artefacts, missing features, etc.

If you can't go over 5FPS it's likely something is wrong with your computer or your Dolphin config though.

[DJBarry004]

Post your configs as screenshots (preferably the graphic ones). Also, most Core 2 CPUs are pretty old (that´s why actual Dolphin builds run slower than before on them).

Anyway, you shouldn´t be getting that bad performance, so as delroth mentioned you could have a problem with hardware (like CPU overheat).

[Duke Nukem]

Yeah well Dolphin is getting more accurate and accurate every day. Accuracy requires good hardware, just look at bsnes/higan.

If you choose to stick with a 3 year old build don't expect to get support here, and if Dolphin means that much you can always upgrade your hardware.

[chango]

Yeah well Dolphin is getting more accurate and accurate every day. Accuracy requires good hardware, just look at bsnes/higan.

If you choose to stick with a 3 year old build don't expect to get support here, and if Dolphin means that much you can always upgrade your hardware.

This is definitely something I considered... and this is also part of my original question: Has there been some fundamental change in recent builds to the backend that would require such a significant boost in power just to perform things it did easily years ago requiring exceptionally less power? (i.e. Midway sound driver hack for Mortal Kombat et. al being removed from MAME but accurate emulation requiring 10x the proc)

I can't imagine that the builds from 3 years ago that run games so rock spot on at 16xAA and using nothing much besides defaul settings without using tricky speed hacks could now be on what I imagine is a much sleeker and rehauled software much more efficient than the last time I used it, yet somehow perform impossibly unusable.

My system is not super far off - Core 2 Quad Q9550 / EVGA GTX560 / 8GB DDR2 Ram / Intel SSD - Surely its not impossible to even achieve 30fps with no antialiasing and 1x Anisotropic filtering. I can not even play at the lowest settings with the latest builds.

I'm still possibly considering my system being obsolete for this software but I'm still leaning more towards a single issue and option that I am overlooking that is causing this performance. Any ideas?

[MayImilae]

Wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is what hasn't changes. OpenGL was completely rewritten, D3D9 was removed, AX-HLE was rewritten, D3D11 and videocommon has seen tons of changes, FIFO emulation has seen tons of changes, tons of changes to JIT, on and on and on and on. Dolphin has come a looooong way since then. And it's even been getting faster lately! It's awesome.

What game you are trying to play? You should get more than 5fps on that rig.

[chango]

Wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is what hasn't changes. OpenGL was completely rewritten, D3D9 was removed, AX-HLE was rewritten, D3D11 and videocommon has seen tons of changes, FIFO emulation has seen tons of changes, tons of changes to JIT, on and on and on and on. Dolphin has come a looooong way since then. And it's even been getting faster lately! It's awesome.

What game you are trying to play? You should get more than 5fps on that rig.

This is exactly what I expected - full rewrites of almost everything, but with those changes coming more efficiency than ever.

Its not any single game that I'm trying to play, its *every* game. Eve Wii Ware. It emulates properly, gets in game, runs and loads fine, it just starts stuttering. That's the best way I can describe it. The stuttering is in sync with the audio (or is it that the audio is in sync with the stuttering?) and it seems to speed up and slow down slightly, so the stuttering can get worse at times. When it stutters it is rendering less than 1FPS at the time. This makes any constant framerate impossible. The CPU and GPU is never taxed to the max load.