Mario Galaxy: HUGE Slowdown In Game

[KidOtaku]

(04-01-2010, 12:21 PM)Ocean Wrote: Never stays at 60 entirely though, it keeps hovering between 58 and 60. If there is heavy light source & lots of enemies it drops to 54-55 but is not very noticeable

I'm currently running Mamario's build of rev. 5271, and am having a hard time reaching constant 55-60 FPS; I get 60 most of the time, i.e. on small planets, but the speed drops down to around 50 in the observatory and 42-45 in some areas of the beehive galaxy. However, when I compare my specs with yours, it seems to me that I'm only lacking in RAM, which should not make such a big difference I think.

My rig:
AMD Phenom II X2 550 @ 3.8 GHz
Radeon HD 5770 1 GB (stock clocks)
2 GB DDR3 1600 MHz
Windows 7 64-bit

If you don't mind, could you (or anyone actually reaching constant 58-60 FPS) please have a look at my config and see if there is any difference with yours? Maybe I just need to turn the magic switch on



Cheers!

[Ocean]

Well, I have those exact same configs pretty much, but disabled bi/trilinear filter. If it wont give you full fps the bottleneck is probably the dualcore processor, and a less likely solution is that 2gb of ram is too little with windows 7.

That's my ram usage if running only dolphin in win7, about 3.5gb if playing mario galaxy.


But if running web browser, mp3 player etc. it goes higher. Not all systems are comparable but I think it's a good idea to upgrade from 2gb

[KidOtaku]

(04-07-2010, 10:00 AM)Ocean Wrote: Well, I have those exact same configs pretty much, but disabled bi/trilinear filter. If it wont give you full fps the bottleneck is probably the dualcore processor, and a less likely solution is that 2gb of ram is too little with windows 7.

That's my ram usage if running only dolphin in win7, about 3.5gb if playing mario galaxy. But if running web browser, mp3 player etc. it goes higher. Not all systems are comparable but I think it's a good idea to upgrade from 2gb

Thanks for your reply! As far as I know, Dolphin only uses two cores, so I don't think having a multi-core CPU makes much of a difference. This being said, I read a bit more on your CPU, and realized it was packing far more punch per core than mine. CPU clock cycles are not everything and therefore I think your CPU being more powerful than mine even at clock speeds is certainly part of the equation.

Besides, I did not really check Dolphin's memory consumption (and now am not at home so I can't do it right now) but your pic is quite revealing. I guess I'll be investing in another 2GB and see if it helps; it certainly won't hurt for PC games anyway, and will definitely be cheaper than getting a core i7 !

Thanks for the help!

[neobrain]

(04-01-2010, 12:21 PM)Ocean Wrote: Never stays at 60 entirely though, it keeps hovering between 58 and 60. If there is heavy light source & lots of enemies it drops to 54-55 but is not very noticeable

Damn I need to get one of those Core i7s

[oohladeeda]

sorry but that's nonsense...
a phenom ii at 3,8ghz outperforms an i7 at only 3,06ghz in almost everything. (not talking about the turbo-option here, which is automatic oc)
and 2gb ram should be more than enough for dolphin (if u don't have too much crap running in background), dolphin alone almost never even reaches 600mb (only if there's huge mem leaks, like in some older revisions).

the problem should be your options @kidotaku disable audio throttle

[Ocean]

(04-09-2010, 11:25 PM)oohladeeda Wrote: sorry but that's nonsense...
a phenom ii at 3,8ghz outperforms an i7 at only 3,06ghz in almost everything. (not talking about the turbo-option here, which is automatic oc)
and 2gb ram should be more than enough for dolphin (if u don't have too much crap running in background), dolphin alone almost never even reaches 600mb (only if there's huge mem leaks, like in some older revisions).

the problem should be your options @kidotaku disable audio throttle

Not true at all, I use phenom II x4 (quad core) clocked to 3.4ghz on my htpc for 1080p tv shows and movies due to good processing power for very cheap price, but it doesn't even come close to the 'weakest' i7 which is 920 @2.66ghz..
See the results, anandtech compared the two in multiple benchmarks and they are not even in the same league

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2702/12
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2702/15
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

It wont matter if you clock it even to 4.0ghz, it will be a bottleneck in gaming systems.

That being said, any phenom II x4 with enough ram should run games on dolphin at full speed just fine. And due to their price point, they are a viable option for gamers.. The difference is at most 20-30% but the price is reflected in that.
If you're building a gaming pc for the first time, phenom II processors are very competitive & I'd recommend them.