Metroid Prime Slowdown Observation

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:NV, Metroid prime has always had slowdowns on all builds. It's a fairly common problem, the slowdowns have existed for as long as I could remember since the game started working.

Nope. I used dolphin from 4770 to 5312 and only had a few small dips the whole game with efb to ram. I left for 4 months, came back, grabbed build 5981 and ever since then all newer builds have less than half the speed of older builds with the exact same settings.

Quote:Hardware does matter, as my upgrade to a Core i7 has recently proved.

Saying software can be optimized to improve performance does not imply that hardware doesn't matter.

[hyperspeed]

I find that Metroid Prime runs at 20FPS without dual core and without skipping idle at the entrance Chozo Ruins.
Enabling dual core in this part should run 40fps not 25FPS.
I think it's a question of dual core.

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I also discovered without idle skipping the sound works better in metroid prime.

[Xtreme2damax]

(09-21-2010, 11:11 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

Quote:NV, Metroid prime has always had slowdowns on all builds. It's a fairly common problem, the slowdowns have existed for as long as I could remember since the game started working.

Nope. I used dolphin from 4770 to 5312 and only had a few small dips the whole game with efb to ram. I left for 4 months, came back, grabbed build 5981 and ever since then all newer builds have less than half the speed of older builds with the exact same settings.

Quote:Hardware does matter, as my upgrade to a Core i7 has recently proved.

Saying software can be optimized to improve performance does not imply that hardware doesn't matter.

I just tested Metroid Prime and speed isn't any different than before, same slowdowns and same speed except a different revision. I have always had these slowdowns, long before the hybrid EFB -> Ram commit. In the opening sequence and beginning there is slowdown due to more being rendered on screen.

Generally the game runs at 45 - 50 FPS except large areas with more geometry, just the same as before.

Oh and I was using Copy EFB -> Ram, 4x SSAA, 2x EFB scale, native mips, cpu -> efb access @ 1280 x 1024 resolution. With lower settings I would have probably gotten better FPS.

Tested on my old Core2Duo E8500 system since I need a new motherboard for my i7 system because I bent the cpu pins on my i7 motherboard.

With your Q6600, you should be getting about the same speed as me.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Enabling dual core in this part should run 40fps not 25FPS.
I think it's a question of dual core.

Nope. Dual core should rarely give you a 100% speedup, it doesn't work that way. The core recompiler and video compiler are almost never going to need exactly the same amount of throughput.

Quote:With your Q6600, you should be getting about the same speed as me.

Depends on the build. Builds from 5016-5312 that I still have all give me 100% speed in all but a few rooms the entire game (including the outside of the beginning and the flaagrha boss room) with efb to ram, and even those rooms run fullspeed if I use efb to texture. In 5981-6117 (your builds I might add) even with efb scale, native mipmaps, and SSAA all off and my resolution cranked down to 800 x 600 with efb to ram I get 60-80% most of the time with drops as low as 40% being frequent. And if I turn off framelimiting to see the framerate I'm capable of, in the same rooms with the same settings on older builds I'm getting 80-100 fps and on newer builds 40-50 fps, so almost exactly half the performance.

I don't know why but for me fullspeed is easily attainable with metroid prime in older builds, but impossible in newer builds.

Edit: Going to upload some screenshots when I get back home so you don't have to take my word on this.

[Xtreme2damax]

Yeah, as I mentioned the drops are because the emulator is rendering more on screen at the time. I don't know about you, but these slowdowns have always existed for me, since several hundred or a thousand plus revisions back when I first started playing the game. I used to hate that fps were so low in the beginning, since I liked the intro when Samus jumps out of her ship and wanted to run it full speed.

[Megidolaon]

I'm also having slowdowns, but severe ones. In Chozo ruins the speed drops down to 5 FPS making the game barely playable (with this speed even frameship can't make up for anything).

I configured the graphics Plugin as recommended in the wiki page for the game:
Plug-in - Direct3D9
EFB Scaled Copy - On
Force Bi/Trilinear Filtering - On
Enable CPU Access - Off
Enable EFB Copy - RAM
Safe Texture Cache - Fast
Disable Fog - On
Audio Throttle - Off

Is there any way I can raise the speed? My hardware should be good enough for decent speed.

[dephined]

Latest revisions are very slow for Metroid Prime...try r6551, for me is one of the fastest with this game (also I suggest to use OpenGL plugin with disable destination alpha pass)

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furthermore I use Enable EFB copy to Textures and don't use Safe texture cache...

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:furthermore I use Enable EFB copy to Textures and don't use Safe texture cache...

EFB to texture will break the x-ray and thermal visors making the game unplayable later on. Not using safe texture cache will cause the game to occasionally crash.

@Megidolaon

Use an older revision. I played through the whole game on 5016 and it was lightning fast compared to modern revisions. Speed gets better or worse over time based on changes made to the emulator.

[dephined]

So till you don't need it, don't use copy to RAM
Anyway with r6xxx I've never experienced any crash without safe texture cache...

[hyperspeed]

I tested with DSPLLE, and this "Slowdown" in Chozo Ruins still exist, would this "Slowdown" is caused because of the FIFO that is wrong, or something else, anyway no game on dolphin, both Wii and GC the speed drops down to 5,10 or 15 FPS like Metroid Prime 1.