Please bring back de-syncrhonized audio

[delroth]

The performance requirements of Dolphin have been continuously decreasing for at least a year.

[Link_to_the_past]

(09-07-2014, 08:07 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Yes, but the OP has a first gen i7, which is showing its age in Dolphin due to the needs of Dolphin increasing.

That statement is false as of late, the latest dev builds are a lot faster compared to 4.0, about 40% in general from some tests i did.

[Xtreme2damax]

(09-07-2014, 08:07 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Yes, but the OP has a first gen i7, which is showing its age in Dolphin due to the needs of Dolphin increasing.

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-please-bring-back-de-syncrhonized-audio?pid=338010#pid338010

As delroth and Lttp stated.

DX11 is still slow as molasses but OpenGL is fast and smooth as butter, less issues too.

[KHg8m3r]

(09-07-2014, 08:47 AM)Link_to_the_past Wrote: That statement is false as of late, the latest dev builds are a lot faster compared to 4.0, about 40% in general from some tests i did.

I just said that it's showing it's age. And yes, the recent builds have been getting a good amount of speedups since 4.0.2 was released.

While first gen i5/i7 systems can still play most moderate to lightly demanding games at or near full speed, they can't keep up with games that have been demanding and are still demanding, as in the Spyro games, which are a bit more than lightly demanding. I can get full speed in SMG no problem, but the Spryo games are tough cookies.

[JMC47]

Can confirm, the Spyro games are tough if you have inefficient drivers.

[triad]

(09-07-2014, 04:05 PM)JMC47 Wrote: Can confirm, the Spyro games are tough if you have inefficient drivers.

If this is a driver issue, has it been reported upstream?

I'm also still confused... if the old behavior was to simply continue processing audio without waiting for explicit commands to do so, what is it that prevents doing that in the current architecture? For games that a) badly need it and b) aren't broken by doing so (i.e. Spyro series), is seems like this would be a much appreciated option. (Obviously with a big disclaimer when enabling it that, if it breaks, you (the user) get to keep the pieces...)

(Oh, and, can someone please satisfy my burning curiosity and tell me just what radical change in CPU architecture I missed that makes a "modern" 2.4 GHz CPU equivalent to a CPU a mere two hears older with twice the cache and 40% higher clock speed?)

[Shonumi]

triad Wrote:I'm also still confused... if the old behavior was to simply continue processing audio without waiting for explicit commands to do so, what is it that prevents doing that in the current architecture? For games that a) badly need it and b) aren't broken by doing so (i.e. Spyro series), is seems like this would be a much appreciated option. (Obviously with a big disclaimer when enabling it that, if it breaks, you (the user) get to keep the pieces...)

AFAIK, the biggest issue (aside from the fact that the developers agree Dolphin should be as accurate as possible in regards to DSP emulation) is that you'd need to maintain two seperate code paths for two distinct approaches to processing audio via HLE. It's not a simple few lines that flip a few variables or call some functions here but not there; the new way of handling audio via HLE is completely different. No one wants to spend the time making and testing changes spread across another component of Dolphin. The ROI simply isn't worth it, not when the developers feel their efforts could be going towards changes they feel are more valuable to the project (see the Dolphin Progress Reports). So in short, adding the old HLE audio implementation as an "option" is totally non-trivial.

triad Wrote:(Oh, and, can someone please satisfy my burning curiosity and tell me just what radical change in CPU architecture I missed that makes a "modern" 2.4 GHz CPU equivalent to a CPU a mere two hears older with twice the cache and 40% higher clock speed?)

Intel's Haswell CPU have close to a 40% increase in performance over CPUs like yours. Whatever changes they made from Ivy Bridge, Dolphin really likes it. We've benchmarked this, and the result appear to be consistent across the board. A Haswell CPU running at the frequency you have for your current machine would play most games without issues.

[Aleron Ives]

The thing to understand about CPUs is that clock rate is only one performance metric. New CPUs often introduce new instruction sets which allow the CPU to perform more tasks in a single cycle. For instance, I've seen many reports on this forum that Intel's Haswell series of CPUs (Intel's current one) is up to 30% faster in Dolphin than Ivy Bridge (Haswell's predecessor), even though many Ivy Bridge and Haswell CPUs operate at the same clock rate. This performance increase isn't present in all applications, but whatever Intel changed between Ivy Bridge and Haswell has resulted in substantial performance increases in Dolphin.

Intel has been focusing on raising the Instructions per cycle (IPC) of its processors recently, which has huge implications for Dolphin, because IPC is one of the main CPU metrics that influences Dolphin's performance. Dolphin is only able to use two CPU cores for emulation (one to emulate the GC/Wii CPU, and one to emulate the GC/Wii GPU), so having a CPU with 4+ cores doesn't result in greater performance in Dolphin. As such, what really matters is how much your CPU can accomplish during each cycle, and current Intel CPUs are much more efficient than old Intel CPUs in this fashion. (They are also much better at this than AMD's current CPUs, which is why people constantly recommend Intel over AMD for users who want the best performance in Dolphin.)

tl;dr

Yes, your old i7 and a new Haswell i7 may both run at 3 GHz, but Haswell is capable of doing more computations in each cycle than Gulftown can, which means it's faster than Gulftown, even though its clock rate hasn't increased very much.

*edit*

Shonumi ninja'd

[Kurausukun]

Why is this thread still alive? It's basically just one person complaining about an inaccurate, broken feature that may have had some benefits to a small user-group of people with underpowered comps. There really is no defense; just get better hardware.

[Shonumi]

I at least think it's worth educating users about how emulation works and why Dolphin does what it does. At the very least it's better than saying something like "deal with it" and offering no explanation whatsoever.