Random...-ish? Lag Spikes

[Dark Aura]

So I have a rather interesting issue...

Whenever I play a game, they tend to get lag spikes. I can run just about every game at a solid 58-60 usually, but these lag spikes just keep happening. It's strange, though... the spikes only ever seem to happen whenever the game does something... How do I put this... New? And this is every time I restart the game, not in general.

Like Galaxy, for example. When I launch myself off of a Star, it lags then suddenly goes back to normal speed. HOWEVER, the second time it happens, even with the same Launch Star, it works fine. And with Brawl, It happens whenever I load up a menu for the first time, then I go back to it later and it loads perfectly fine (And sometimes when preforming a move of some kind: Again, works fin after).

And this is every time I restart the game, not in general. I could be totally wrong about this, because sometimes the things that cause a spike one playthrough won't on the next. If need be, I can record some footage for an example, but it will probably lag it a bit.


For reference, though, here's my settings currently:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

   
   
   
   
   
   

And Specs:
Operating System:Windows 7 x64Processor/CPU:Intel ® Core™ i7 -3720QM CPU @ 2.60 GHzVideo Card/GPU:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675mMemory/RAM:16.0 GB

[pauldacheez]

This may be related to either disc access time, shader caching/compilation, or just a general speed/configuration/you're-not-using-enough-speedhacks issue. I forget what to do about that second potential cause other than to just try to treat the third, but the first one's fixable by using an SSD, and the third can be alleviated by checking "DSP on Dedicated Thread" and Graphics > Hacks > Ignore Format Changes (of course, don't set these in games where they cause problems, e.g. Wind Waker and Skyward Sword, respectively). (Also set the Framelimit back to Auto, setting the limiter manually is silly and can cause issues. And the External Frame Buffer can be disabled for most games. And the Internal Resolution ideally should be 3x or 4x instead of Auto (Window Size), as the latter causes issues in some games (e.g. Wind Waker). (Okay, yeah, I'll shut up about your settings now.))

[Dark Aura]

I tried as many of those options as I could, but nothing seemed to work: It still gets Random Spikes of Lag. Even if I'm just standing perfectly still in a game, if I just keep waiting it spikes down again, then goes back up to 60. Even with as many Speed Hacks as I could use, the spikes still go down to the exact same frame rate. I could swear this didn't happen to me when I first started using dolphin, but I even tried using Older Revisions and nothing worked...

The only thing I haven't tried is using an SSD... And that's because I'm not really sure how to do that and don't know any way to activate it, or if it's even something I CAN activate it. I honestly don't know what it is, so if I could get any other explanation on what it is I'd appriciate it. Either that, or any other meathod would be fine.

[pauldacheez]

An SSD is a solid-state drive – basically a hard drive, but with ridiculously fast access times, no moving parts so it doesn't break as easily, and... costs more and comes in smaller sizes. Point is, it's a hardware upgrade, so you can't just toggle it. Other sources of slow disc access times are from running the game off a network share or off the original discs (the few optical drives that can read Wii discs at all usually read them *very* slowly).

Quite frankly, I don't know off the top of my head what could be causing this. Continue poking around for a solution for now. v_v