Metroid Prime trilogy crashes during door loading (& occasionally causes burn-in)

[EamonX]

Hi there, I've been playing the Metroid Prime trilogy on Dolphin. I recently just finished the first game and I had one error that occurred when I shoot a door and the next section would load before the door opened. The game crashed and some dialog boxes popped up.

After clicking 'ok' on each of them, randomly, the black loading screen (with MP logo in bottom corner) would then intensely flicker across the main game (which was still playable after the crash). I kept on playing till I got to a save point then exited Dolphin.
But the black loading screen had burned into my monitor including the flickering. I'd switch off my monitor and PC and turn off the power switches and restart them both, and it'd remain. Only after a while, the burn-in faded away. I've been playing PC games for like 2 decades now, and have had loads of different monitors over the years, but this was the first time I experienced a burn-in from a game.

Anyway, it happened only once with Metroid Prime 1. Now I'm playing Metroid Prime 2 and this error happens very frequently. After the 3 dialog boxes pop up, I have to quickly exit Dolphin when the flickering occurs to stop the image burning into the screen. These are the dialog boxes I get:







Just would like to add:

- I'm using 4K custom textures that were created by this dude.
- Not using any cheats.
- Using Vulkan graphics API and enabled V-sync.
- Error occurs both in windowed mode and Fullscreen (exclusive & borderless)
- Shader is set to Asynchronous (Ubershaders) as I found it's the fastest with least stuttering in-game.
- 6x Native internal res for 4K, 8x MSAA, 16z Anistropic filtering

So... anyone know what the problem is?

[RoranVanq]

I'd start with changing backends. I had crashing on Xenoblade and changing it from Vulkan to D3D11 fixed it. Though my crashing was random, and updating my drivers let me use Vulkan again.

[JMC47]

Turn off dualcore and it should never do this.

[EamonX]

(08-03-2019, 02:35 PM)RoranVanq Wrote: I'd start with changing backends. I had crashing on Xenoblade and changing it from Vulkan to D3D11 fixed it. Though my crashing was random, and updating my drivers let me use Vulkan again.

Still had the same crashing problem after changing to D3D11.

(08-03-2019, 07:46 PM)JMC47 Wrote: Turn off dualcore and it should never do this.

This appears to solve it. Only issue is when using Synchronous Ubershaders, I lose like 14-20 frames when I was already hitting 60 fps. But with Asynchronous Ubershaders I can manage to keep it around 60.
But I've only tested for like 10 minutes. Will report back after lengthy test if the same problem happens again.

[ExtremeDude2]

(08-03-2019, 09:05 PM)EamonX Wrote: This appears to solve it. Only issue is when using Synchronous Ubershaders, I lose like 14-20 frames when I was already hitting 60 fps. But with Asynchronous Ubershaders I can manage to keep it around 60.
But I've only tested for like 10 minutes. Will report back after lengthy test if the same problem happens again.

You should almost never use synchronous shaders, async is fine.

[mbc07]

Well, I can see why OP might have enabled Synchronous Ubershaders as the owner of a GTX 1080 Ti which is no slouch, Dolphin's description text for Synchronous Ubershaders mentioning it has "high GPU performance requirements" and that's "only recommended for high-end systems" doesn't help too. That text should probably be changed, especially the "recommended for high-end systems" part. I can't really think of any real user-case for Synchronous Ubershaders other than debugging purposes...

[EamonX]

Yep, I kept it async permanently after.

So reporting back after completing Metroid Prime Trilogy. After disabling Dual Core, MP2 Echoes never had any crashes. However, there were more frequent frame drops (despite on async shaders). Made for a slightly fustrating experience, but bearable enough to not be completely immersion breaking.

After finishing Echoes, I decided to switch Dual Core back on for Metroid Prime 3 Corruption to see how it would work. The frequent pattern of crashes in Echoes didn't occur... but only not frequently. They did periodically show up. Thankfully though it wasn't during ANY loading session i.e. doors, but only during flying from one planet to another. Generally, it would occur after destroying a planet's Leviathan seed and going to space. But it wasn't a frequent problem so quite bearable.

[dezraj]

(08-03-2019, 07:46 PM)JMC47 Wrote: Turn off dualcore and it should never do this.

What would be the problem with dualcore and this game?

[mbc07]

Dual Core mode is prone to have desync issues and some games are very sensitive to that, showing lots of weird issues when Dual Core mode is enabled. Metroid Prime series are known to have issues that magically disappear when running in Single Core mode...