Performance was flawless and now stuttery

[orshick]

Hi guys,

Being able to run games well on Dolphin was one of the reasons I got the higher end CPU i7 4770k last year, and I was not dissapointed, Dolphin emulation was great at the highest resolutions my monitor could handle. The other day though, I tried running Wind Waker again, and all of a sudden there was a stutter problem. Every few seconds it would have a split second hitch up, making it a very unpleasant experience overall. Now, I messed around with some of my cpu overclocking settings just before that, but with disappointing results, and while I'm pretty sure I reverted all those settings back to default (as I exited the UEFI I chose to load defaults, saved and exited), but I can't help but wonder if perhaps I did change something that would explain this worsening of performance. I haven't used Dolphin for quite a bit though, so it could have gotten worse even before that. Would anyone have any idea what could be causing this for me?

My specs are:

cpu - i7 4770k
gpu - 760gtx
ram - 16gb
mb - Asrock z87 pro3

Thanks in advance,

-O

[admin89]

Stay away from stable version (4.0.2) ! You should download latest dev version instead , latest dolphin run much faster
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/09/30/dolphin-progress-report-september-2014/

[orshick]

(11-27-2014, 08:54 AM)admin89 Wrote: Stay away from stable version (4.0.2) ! You should download latest dev version instead , latest dolphin run much faster
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/09/30/dolphin-progress-report-september-2014/

Okay, that seems to have done the trick. Kind of weird though, since it DID run perfectly fine on the stable version before. BTW, I don't quite understand how these dev versions work...are the devs simply adding changes to the emulator on their own and compiling them later for a stable release, or does each subsequent dev version have features of the previous ones included in it as well?

Thanks for the help.

-O

[AnyOldName3]

The developers work on new features on various branches of Dolphin, and when something's ready, it's added to the Master branch. The newest build in the Master branch therefore has all the latest and greatest changes, minus some that we don't know work yet. The builds offered on the download page are from the master branch.

When the devs feel they've made a good chunk of progress, and also nothing that used to work has been broken, they do thorough testing and then release a new stable build. This means each stable build is always better than the previous one (potentially discounting speed as that's not as important as accuracy to a good emulator). Right now, there are some interesting things happening to the project, and also there are a few outstanding regressions which no-one's fixed yet, so it's not a good time for a new stable build.

[mbc07]

(11-27-2014, 10:16 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: The developers work on new features on various branches of Dolphin, and when something's ready, it's added to the Master branch.

Uh, no. That's how it worked in Google Code, now that Dolphin moved to git, the development is based in Pull Requests. Basically a developer (can be anyone, not just the team) come to Dolphin repository, create a pull request with the changes they made and then all active devs take a look at the code and say if it LGTM ("looks good to me"). If there's no questions/complaints and no bugs, wrong coding style, etc., the pull request is merged in the Dolphin repository by an "official" dev and a new build become available at download page including the changes...

[AnyOldName3]

So we don't have branches any more? Github allows branches as well as pull requests. Where does stuff go that's definitely miles away from begin ready to merge?

[mimimi]

(11-27-2014, 09:19 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: So we don't have branches any more? Github allows branches as well as pull requests. Where does stuff go that's definitely miles away from begin ready to merge?

In the private repositories of the devs. Even in the PRs there's some stuff that's not going to be merged soon, or for some maybe ever.

[orshick]

Thanks a lot everyone, this has been illuminating in terms of how this thing gets made.

BTW, is there a way to restore emulator default settings? When uninstalled the latest stable build to install the new master, it seems to have retained the settings from the former.

Thanks again,

-O

[Kurausukun]

If you want to do a "clean install," so to speak, you can delete the Dolphin folder AND the directory in your Documents folder called "Dolphin Emulator." Then redownload the latest dev build and set it up again.

[xystus]

And it's always possible to create a "standalone" version of Dolphin, by creating a portable.txt in you Dolphin root folder. This way you can create a "clean" Dolphin without the hassle