Project M - frames drop, never returning to normal

[MaxPower]

Greetings all.

I've been using Dolphin 4.0-652 to play Project M, a Super Smash Bros Brawl Mode, with netplay. I've been playing for months, but just suddenly I've had problems I never had before.

My problem is that I'm running the game at 60 fps and then, all of a sudden, it can be in the middle of a match, the game frames rate drastically drops and it never goes up to normal (60 fps) during the same session. It can drop to 45fps or to 10 fps. Restarting the emulation resets the fps to 60, but that is a bit inconvenient. The drop can occur after 10 to 30 mins. It occurs offline as well as online (in netplay), so it's not a connection problem.

Begining of the session, everything is fine : http://puu.sh/h1HTf/6cc4b81a50.jpg (FPS shown top left)

And then... : http://puu.sh/h1HUN/584cf12a7c.jpg

I've been doing some tests with no other programs open than Dolphin. My CPU usage is at 80% at most when Dolphin with Project M is running, so it should be fine on that regard.

To set up my Dolphin, I followed the guide here : http://www.smashladder.com/help/windows

Here are the setting I put on Dolphin : http://puu.sh/h1I6g/d816fcf7c5.png

And here are my dxdiag to show my PC comps (sorry my OS is in french, but you should be able to understand, if not tell me and I'll traduce) : http://puu.sh/h1IcN/a1b36b1f3a.png

So I'm at lost here guys. I did several tests and tried different settings but with no results. I also tried to delete Dolphin and Dolphin Settings and re-download it, still no results. At this point, I'm not sure of whats going on, so I'm posting here in hope someone more competent than me could give me some insights.

Thank you for having read my message, and have a good day.

[Kurausukun]

Newer dev versions are much faster and have all the netplay capability that the old netplay branch had AFAIK. See if the issue still happens on the latest revision (5962 at the moment).

[yl-smash]

NAND sync does not exist outside of 652 so that is impossible for OP to play netplay. Your settings look fine, check out this gpu section of this guide, it applies. https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-laptop-performance-guide

[DrHouse64]

Are you using a custom iso, or the SD launcher method?

[MaxPower]

Kurausukun -> Ill try to do several tests offline with the latest build to see if the problem occurs. But I'm not too sure about something, how does netplay work on that build ? I keep having those error when I try to host a netplay game : http://puu.sh/h2plK/f4db729f5d.png. So I believe that has something to do with the Tranversal and Port section here : http://puu.sh/h2pox/19b2ab0dd7.png, but I'm not too sure what to write on those field. I believe those was set automatically with the previous build I was using (4.0-652), so it's the first time I see those settings. I'll try to look on the forum for more information but so far with Google alone I failed to find the answer to this.

yl-smash -> "NAND sync does not exist outside of 652 so that is impossible for OP to play netplay." I'm not exactly sure about what you meant, but I've been playing netplay fine with 4.0-652 before my problem occured. Also, I'll check up your link, thank you, even though I'm not sure if it's a gpu problem.

DrHouse64 -> I used the iso builder that build the Super Smash Bros Brawl iso into a Project M iso : http://www.smashladder.com/help/windows
It's against the rule to talk about where I found iso, so I can't talk about it, but I'm pretty sure my Super Smash Bros Brawl iso is legit. So yea the Project M iso itself is kind of custom (since its a mod), but I've been using the same as everyone else on smashladder and they doesn't seem to have this problem with my current settings.

Thank you for your replies guys.

[MaxPower]

Hello all,

I want to make an upgrade to my thread, as I solved my problem. It was indeed a GPU problem as yl-smash suggested. I opted for the dedicated GPU approach from that link : https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-laptop-performance-guide. This is an optimization I was sure I did in the past, but somehow it wasn't correctly set.

I want to thank you all for your replies.

Have a nice day,

Max Power