Movies stuttering with audio on MacOS

[Zardozer]

Hi, I'm running identical versions of Dolphin (5.0-11991) on both MacOS and Windows 10. On MacOS, it actually runs pretty well on my Mac Pro trashcan (AMD D700 GPUs), MacOS 10.14.6 Mojave, with the exception of full-motion videos which seem to be running slow, with audio that's 'stretched' out. I had to turn on audio stretching because otherwise the audio stutters even worse. Audio settings are otherwise default with Cubeb. I even turned off audio to see if that's the problem, but it still runs the full-motion videos very slowly.

I've tried running it at native internal resolution, turning off anisotropic filtering/AA, and those don't make any difference whatsoever. The games themselves run full speed 60fps, it's just that whenever it needs to play a video, it slows down. And I'm sure playing FMV is way less taxing than rendering the game, so there's got to be some bug that's causing this. In Windows, of course, the videos and emulation run full speed. I also recently installed DolphiniOS on my iPhone, and that runs the FMV and games full speed too! Both MacOS and iOS are set to Vulkan for backend, btw.

Anyone also get this FMV issue with MacOS? You can see this particularly well with Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. As soon as the opening movie starts, it's goes into slow-motion.

[MayImilae]

You didn't specific what game you are encountering these FMVs in. Games have maaaany ways of handling videos and how a particular FMV will perform depends almost entirely on the specific method a game is using!

[Zardozer]

(05-14-2020, 08:57 AM)MayImilae Wrote: You didn't specific what game you are encountering these FMVs in. Games have maaaany ways of handling videos and how a particular FMV will perform depends almost entirely on the specific method a game is using!

Hi, thanks for the reply. Yes, an easy one to see this issue is in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I haven't really played through much of this game, but the intro movie and subsequent movies are all slow like this. Another one is Metroid Prime, where it starts with an FMV before you get to the menu, and when you start a game, that FMV continues. It's not as slow as Fire Emblem, but it's definitely not full speed either.

[Zardozer]

I should say also that Metroid Prime and most other games actually run quite well otherwise. There are a few places in Metroid Prime where it runs more slowly, typically when there's many pirates all at once in a small space in some spots in the mines. Not sure if it's related to the slowdowns in FMV. You'd think that a 6-core Xeon processor could handle it all, but then again, it's from 2014.

[DJBarry004]

Xeon processors are server-oriented, where a chunk of cores really come in handy. Can´t say the same for Dolphin.

[KHg8m3r]

It's not that the Xeon isn't good, it's a Xeon E5-1650v2 @ 3.5Ghz from 2013. That's an Ivybridge-EP core, so while it doesn't have the post-Haswell speedup in IPC that Dolphin loves, it's still an OK CPU for Dolphin due to the higher base clock speed.

I'd say the problem comes from the fact that it has Apple's terrible GPU drivers on an older AMD D700 GPU that isn't made for gaming. Windows has way better drivers which is why OP doesn't have a problem with Windows, only macOS.

[Zardozer]

thanks for the input, guys. Yes, I imagined it might be a GPU or driver issue, but I also thought there might have been a setting I was overlooking because it seemed odd that only the FMV would really have the problems and the gameplay itself was pretty good. It's also surprising that the slow-down happens with FMV, which isn't usually that taxing. Upon further testing with Wii games in particular, Mario Galaxy did struggle with framerates, although Animal Crossing City Folk ran well (it's simply a less demanding game). All in all it's more suited to GC games, not surprising since it's not a gaming-focused machine with its GPUs from 2013.