Random Lag Spikes on Mario Kart Wii

[fox789]

I get several lag spikes throughout races online and offline (it's a little worse online though) and the lag spikes cause my ending position to be affected while online, basically making it unplayable. I've recorded a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIM4bzcxDU In the video, native res is 1x, no anti-aliasing, OpenGL backend, Ubershaders on exclusive and every other option is set to performance. However, even at much higher visual settings, the game runs at 60fps, but the lag spikes are still just as common. No matter what settings/backends I try, including Ubershaders set to hybrid, the lag spikes are always there and are seemingly completely random (even when sitting doing nothing in time trial mode). Anyone know how to fix this?

Specs:
Windows 10
i7 6700k 4.5ghz
EVGA GTX 1080ti FTW3
16GB 3200mhz G.Skill Ripjaws V series
1TB PNY SSD

Dolphin 5.0-5681

[JosJuice]

If you have enabled the per-game setting "Speed Up Disk Transfer Rate", turn it off again.

Also, is this vanilla Mario Kart Wii, or are you loading some kind of mods from a virtual SD card?

[fox789]

If you have enabled the per-game setting "Speed Up Disk Transfer Rate", turn it off again.

Also, is this vanilla Mario Kart Wii, or are you loading some kind of mods from a virtual SD card?

All of those settings were default, I just tried messing around with those settings now and it hasn't changed anything. And what kinds of mods do you mean from a virtual SD card? I haven't heard of that, but I am using a modded ISO to play on a custom server, but the same thing still happens even on a normal ISO.

[JosJuice]

All of those settings were default, I just tried messing around with those settings now and it hasn't changed anything. And what kinds of mods do you mean from a virtual SD card? I haven't heard of that, but I am using a modded ISO to play on a custom server, but the same thing still happens even on a normal ISO.

I'm not sure if there are any specific mods for Mario Kart Wii that run from an SD card, I just know that such mods exist for other games like SSBB. Anyway, none of the potential issues that I had in mind apply to your situation then.

[fox789]

Well I managed to solve my problem, for the most part. For some reason, having any gecko codes enabled at all was causing the lag spikes. So I patched the games files with the codes I had and disabled Dolphin's codes, and even though I still had the same codes, everything was pretty much perfect. Why would this be?

Now while playing offline there are no lag spikes whatsoever, however, I still get very small lag spikes online (a small one maybe once every two races, regardless of settings I try). Is this normal when using Dolphin's online feature? (Not netplay). Is there something else I can do?

[JosJuice]

Well I managed to solve my problem, for the most part. For some reason, having any gecko codes enabled at all was causing the lag spikes. So I patched the games files with the codes I had and disabled Dolphin's codes, and even though I still had the same codes, everything was pretty much perfect. Why would this be?

The new Gecko codehandler that Dolphin switched to a few months ago has these kinds of problems, unfortunately. This is something we would like to fix, but there aren't any concrete plans right now. The codehandler that's included with 5.0 shouldn't have this problem, and you can copy over that file to a development version of Dolphin if you want to. Thanks for pointing out that this was the problem – it'll be useful if we need to help someone else who has this problem in the future.

Now while playing offline there are no lag spikes whatsoever, however, I still get very small lag spikes online (a small one maybe once every two races, regardless of settings I try). Is this normal when using Dolphin's online feature? (Not netplay). Is there something else I can do?

I haven't heard of that problem before. Maybe there's some part of IOS HLE that runs an expensive operation synchronously on the CPU thread... But that's just a guess. Either way, I don't think there's much you can do about it.