Paper Mario slow down assistance

[TheeDrewGamer]

Hi there everyone,

I'm going through Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door for the first time, and overall the game has run extremely smooth. There is a slightly audio tear between screens, that I'm trying to fix but the main issue is this section in the train station. When I get into the elevator it begins to slow down, and with the amount of creatures at the bottom. I believe it's causing a big slow down.

I went to the wiki to get the settings, and it's a little better. It was dropping down to 11% speed and now it goes down to 66%. However if any one has has any ideas, on how to get it passed this bit without it stuttering I'd be really grateful.

I've included a video for you to have a look, just in case you need it:

I have it on Direct3d12 but Direc3D11 and OpenGL do the same thing.
My adapter is my NVIDIA GeForce GTA 1660 Ti
I have V-Sync on.
I upped it to x3 resolution but native or x2 do the same thing.
In hacks I have Skip EFB Access from CPU, Ignore format changes, defer EFB copies to RAM, Store XFB copies to texture only, skip presenting duplicate frames, and the 4 other options all turned on.

https://youtu.be/s0BRH5MdP5E

Thank you for any help you can provide!

--TheeDrewGamer

[themaster123]

Have you try the vulken backend. Also is the gpu and windows on high performance? There is way to have dolphin per profile in nvidia control panel and you can setup it there so it go to high performance there so it doesn't affect the rest of the programs. There also make sure that aysnc uburshader and compile shader before start is check. Also I notice in you profile you have a AMD FX-8320, fx series wasn't never great with dolphin due to there lower per clock ipc. You could try to overclock it to see if it help but from what I tell in the video it look like it running into a cpu limit. For more reading on that here dolphin cpu guide page https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#which-cpu-should-i-use.

[TheeDrewGamer]

(02-24-2021, 06:29 PM)themaster123 Wrote: Have you try the vulken backend. Also is the gpu and windows on high performance? There is way to have dolphin per profile in nvidia control panel and you can setup it there so it go to high performance there so it doesn't affect the rest of the programs. There also make sure that aysnc uburshader and compile shader before start is check. Also I notice in you profile you have a AMD FX-8320, fx series wasn't never great with dolphin due to there lower per clock ipc. You could try to overclock it to see if it help but from what I tell in the video it look like it running into a cpu limit. For more reading on that here dolphin cpu guide page https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#which-cpu-should-i-use.

Thank you so much themaster! I'll give that a go and see what happens. With my CPU, it barely gets any use when I use Dolphin. At max my CPU goes to 28% with Dolphin, but usually it's low 20's while running it. This is the only part of the game that this has happened, the rest of the game has always been extremely smooth, even when there are a bunch of characters on screen. It just doesn't seem to like this part for whatever reason.

Edit: I tried out Vulcan, high performance mode, switched to asyncubershader and turned on compile shaders and it's still doing the issue. Honestly at this point, I think it's the game itself just not being able to run it properly at this point. This is about 24 hours into the game and I've not had any slow down issues up until this point, and if I go passed this point it runs perfectly again.

Edit 2: In the advanced settings I turned on Overclocking there, increasing it made it worse, decreasing it made it run without the audio tearing but the frame rate was less. I don't want to touch that though, as it can break other games.

[themaster123]

For the record the percent of cpu doesn't mean you not running into a cpu limit. Dolphin doesn't benefit from more then 3 core in general. If look at those percent you using around 2 to a little of a 3th core. When I meant overclocking a meant to overclock the fx 8320 not the emulated cpu. Sorry about that. For more on this in the same guide they talk about why that can't use more cores. https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldnt-dolphin-use-more-my-cpu-cores-go-faster.

[TheeDrewGamer]

(02-25-2021, 05:29 AM)themaster123 Wrote: For the record the percent of cpu doesn't mean you not running into a cpu limit. Dolphin doesn't benefit from more then 3 core in general. If look at those percent you using around 2 to a little of a 3th core. When I meant overclocking a meant to overclock the fx 8320 not the emulated cpu. Sorry about that. For more on this in the same guide they talk about why that can't use more cores. https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/faq/#couldnt-dolphin-use-more-my-cpu-cores-go-faster.

Oh sorry I didn't edit again before you responded, I'm aware you meant the actual CPU, I just wanted to test Overclock setting in the emulator to see if there was a difference and underclocking it there seemed to do something. 

As for actual overclocking, I tried it and it didn't work. It's just this one tiny little section of the game that's running into the issue, the rest of the game works perfect. So I'm thinking it's the game itself. All the other games I've tried work perfectly too, it's just this bit here that's the issue. It was originally a lot worse than that, and changing one setting made it go from 11% speed to 86%. So I'm not sure at this point.

Edit: I noticed all the other games I tried run at 30fps max, if I reduce the speed and it goes to 30fps it runs perfect in that section. Is there a way to lock the fps without reducing the speed?

[KHg8m3r]

Games for the Gamecube/Wii are usually coded to have a hard frame-limit of 30 or 60, very few have variable FPS like a PC game, so you can't "lock" the fps to a lower FPS than it was designed for without an AR Code or modifying the game.

Paper Mario TTYD uses a feature of the GC/Wii hardware called bounding box (one of like 7 games that does) to render certain effects. It can cause slowdowns like this when used heavily in certain scenes because it was easy on the GC/Wii hardware but taxing on PC hardware.

The Overclocking feature in Dolphin over-clocks the speed of the emulated CPU of the GC/Wii. Higher values may help in scenarios when the original hardware was bottled-necked, and but increases the emulator requirements.

[TheeDrewGamer]

(02-25-2021, 07:18 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Games for the Gamecube/Wii are usually coded to have a hard frame-limit of 30 or 60, very few have variable FPS like a PC game, so you can't "lock" the fps to a lower FPS than it was designed for without an AR Code or modifying the game.

Paper Mario TTYD uses a feature of the GC/Wii hardware called bounding box (one of like 7 games that does) to render certain effects. It can cause slowdowns like this when used heavily in certain scenes because it was easy on the GC/Wii hardware but taxing on PC hardware.

The Overclocking feature in Dolphin over-clocks the speed of the emulated CPU of the GC/Wii. Higher values may help in scenarios when the original hardware was bottled-necked, and but increases the emulator requirements.

Thank you so much for this KHg8m3r! This makes a lot of sense on why it's slowing down in this specific scene. As I have it running at 88% speed now, it's not too much of an issue. So it might be a case of just getting passed it and not worrying about it, because everything else works fine without any issues.