PAL60 on slow computer?

[oioioi99]

Hi all,

My CPU is old and really on the slow side for Dolphin. Some games are struggling to play at a decent speed, while others run great.

My games are all PAL, and my question is if I should enable the PAL60 option in Dolphin, or would this just slow things down? I.e. would playing a game at 45fps with PAL60 enabled be more sluggish than playing it at 45fps without the option enabled?

Many thanks!
Oi

[admin89]

PAL max FPS is either 25 or 50FPS depending on the game
NTSC max FPS is either 30 or 60FPS....
If a certain game can only run at 50FPS on your PC , by turning on PAL60 , 50FPS will be below 60FPS which is full speed .
If you can't reach full speed , you will have audio-stuttering issue
You better ignore that option

[oioioi99]

Many thanks for your speedy response!
Oi

[Neui]

Um what?

PAL Games outputs normally 50 FPS (or half of that, 25 FPS).
If you activate PAL60 AND the game supports it, the game might output 60 FPS (or half of that, 30 FPS).
This means, you have to render 10 (or 5) more frames in a second. In Graphic-intensive games, it might be more laggy due do more frames being rendered.

But, you can just try it out for yourself and see, if it makes any difference.

[Helios]

Another thing you can try in the latest development build is in Config, the last tab should have a Wii emulated clock setting. You can underclock the emulated CPU to make it less intensive on your CPU and you might be able to run the games at full speed. Side effects are the game's emulated framerates going down (But emulated speed going up), or games just flat out breaking. It's not recommended to use, but worth a shot for games that won't break.

[mimimi]

There's only a minimal difference between PAL50 and PAL60 from the performance. You get stuttering if it's below 100% speed, no matter if that is 25,30,50 or 60 fps. You will mostly likely get the same % on both modes, just try it.

[Shonumi]

There's only a minimal difference between PAL50 and PAL60 from the performance.

I would assume the bulk of that difference would be GPU related, correct? I.e. that's less stuff per-second Dolphin is asking the GPU to handle. But in that case, most people will never see a noticeable difference unless their GPU is struggling?

[mimimi]

I don't know where it ends up. But Rachel did some benchmarking on it with Xenoblade, and the difference was like 2% and definitely not something like the ~17-20% you would expect.

[Shonumi]

Yeah, I expected it to be pretty low like that. I would test this myself see if it ends up in the GPU (e.g. bottleneck it on GPU via high IRs), but I don't own any games that would work with the PAL60 option

[oioioi99]

Many thanks for all your helpful advice! I'll play around with it and see how things go...

I'll also try to underclock the emulated CPU and see if that will improve things. Would it be possible to set the underclock for specific games in the gameini settings? Most of my games run OK and wouldn't need it...

Cheers,
Oi