Possible accumulated input lag?

[Nightquaker]

Hello there :3
I've been playing Taiko quite a lot recently and there is a problem I've noticed.
I have two Taiko imports for Wii, which would be a second one (Taiko no Tatsujin Wii: Do Don to 2 Daime) and fifth one (Taiko no Tatsujin Wii: Chogouka-Ban) and they both share a very bothersome issue.
When I play them, game runs at 100% all the time, without a single speed drop. However, when I'm playing the song, microstuttering happens. The game chugs for 100ms or so every now and then for no reason, since it happens on decently calm parts of the song. After about 30 seconds, I start to notice very significant input delay, and it grows until it becomes quite bothersome.
I have a theory that the microstuttering slowly desynchronizes sound from image and accumulates input delay, which makes the game sometimes unplayable due to timing of notes with the song.
Can anyone confirm if I'm right and is there any way to fix the microstuttering? Or, maybe there is other way to fix the desynchronization?
My specs are:
AMD Phenom X3 at 2.3GHz
HD6850
4 gigs of DDR2 RAM
OS is Windows 8.0 x64
My Dolphin version is 4.0
Thank you :3

[KHg8m3r]

You have two options for speed ups, both of which I recommend you doing:
1) if your motherboard supports it, overclock your CPU. Also check to make sure that windows power options is set to max performance.
2)grab the latest dev build of Dolphin because it's way faster than 4.0

[Nightquaker]

(12-23-2014, 02:50 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: You have two options for speed ups, both of which I recommend you doing:
1) if your motherboard supports it, overclock your CPU. Also check to make sure that windows power options is set to max performance.
2)grab the latest dev build of Dolphin because it's way faster than 4.0

Well, as I mentioned, speed never drops for me in the game and stays at 100% 60fps, even at most intense moments and microstuttering can be totally unrelated to my hardware and can be caused by emulator itself. I don't really need a 'speedup'. Besides, microstuttering happens on fairly calm moments of the game, which I did mention as well.

[KHg8m3r]

I mention speed because what I can see, Dolphin is just barely making it to 100% speed, so the inputs are just slightly off when the micro stuttering happens, and then can't keep up because of desyncing.

I say overclock because AMD CPUs don't have great single-threaded performance, and Dolphin is only a dual-core program that heavily relies on those two cores. So the faster you can get your CPU to go, the less likely Dolphin will micro stutter. A base clock of 2.3 Ghz on an AMD CPU is asking for trouble.

I say to grab the latest dev build for similar reasons about Dolphin not hitting a constant 100%. The latest dev builds (over 4700 changes from 4.0 stable) have made Dolphin waaaaaaaay faster and more stable, so the microstuttering should be gone even if you don't overclock. There have also been changes to how controllers are handled to allow better response time.

[Nightquaker]

(12-23-2014, 03:09 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: I mention speed because what I can see, Dolphin is just barely making it to 100% speed, so the inputs are just slightly off when the micro stuttering happens, and then can't keep up because of desyncing.

I say overclock because AMD CPUs don't have great single-threaded performance, and Dolphin is only a dual-core program that heavily relies on those two cores. So the faster you can get your CPU to go, the less likely Dolphin will micro stutter. A base clock of 2.3 Ghz on an AMD CPU is asking for trouble.

I say to grab the latest dev build for similar reasons about Dolphin not hitting a constant 100%. The latest dev builds (over 4700 changes from 4.0 stable) have made Dolphin waaaaaaaay faster and more stable, so the microstuttering should be gone even if you don't overclock. There have also been changes to how controllers are handled to allow better response time.

Well, I did run some stuff in the background aside from Dolphin and it still ran at constant 100%, even with additional load on the CPU, so I don't think it's my hardware. The game is not the most intensive one anyway.
I will try the latest dev build, but I highly doubt that it will solve the problem.

Anyway, so my theory about accumulated input delay due to microstuttering is right then?

[KHg8m3r]

That's because the other programs can be shuffled to other cores that Dolphin isn't using.

I would say a tentative yes given my limited understanding of Dolphin around the 4.0 builds (devs if I am wrong please correct me). But please let me know when you try out the latest builds, because the stutter should be gone.

[Nightquaker]

(12-23-2014, 03:18 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: That's because the other programs can be shuffled to other cores that Dolphin isn't using.

I would say a tentative yes given my limited understanding of Dolphin around the 4.0 builds (devs if I am wrong please correct me). But please let me know when you try out the latest builds, because the stutter should be gone.

I sure do hope that stuttering will be gone, 'cause man, I love Taiko and want to play these two quite badly. I will report with the results momentarily.

[Nightquaker]

(12-23-2014, 03:18 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: That's because the other programs can be shuffled to other cores that Dolphin isn't using.

I would say a tentative yes given my limited understanding of Dolphin around the 4.0 builds (devs if I am wrong please correct me). But please let me know when you try out the latest builds, because the stutter should be gone.

Sorry for double post, but I do have two things to say:
1. Microstuttering isn't gone, it's much more noticeable with the latest build.
2. The synchronization method seems to have been improved a lot, so the desynchronization doesn't happen at all anymore.

You see, I couldn't care less about microstuttering itself, but only about the desynchronization and input lag it caused. It doesn't seem to cause them anymore, so I can run songs that were previously unplayable perfectly with almost full combos now, as it should be.

So I guess, I'm happy with the results at this point. I should've considered updating to the latest build beforehand, but thank you for making me do it nonetheless :3

[KHg8m3r]

No problem. Try running the same songs twice, and see if on the second run if the microstuttering is still there. That could be caused by the shader cache being created.

And remember, overclocking if you ever have more issues