Serious slowdown in Resident Evil 4

[Glitcher]

I'm having some trouble getting Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition to run at a consistently smooth framerate. For the most part the game is fine, but there are some sections where there's a noticeable drop in framerate. The most notable sections are the gondolas and the sewers with those camouflaged bugs where the framerate drops to around 10fps.

I've tried looking up guides for maximising Dolphin's performance and I use the Razer Game Booster, but the problem remains. I bought my PC last Fall and it's pretty fast for all things gaming; you can check my specs. Does anyone else experience slowdown in Resi 4? If not, what kind of specs and settings do you have?

[Anti-Ultimate]

Your PC is strangely build:
It features a top notch i7, 16 gigs of RAM and what GPU? A entry level GT630. I can assume the guys who built your computer had no idea what they were doing, however let's not talk about that.

Could you try using 1xIR and EFB to Texture? If that speeds things up, you have a GPU bottleneck. While a i7 3770 at stock should be enough, I can't really check. I only have my Haswell to test, which is already way faster.

[haddockd]

+1 for EFB to Texture but remember it is required to use the heat scope.

Post your settings

[Glitcher]

(04-25-2014, 12:34 AM)Anti-Ultimate Wrote: Could you try using 1xIR and EFB to Texture? If that speeds things up, you have a GPU bottleneck. While a i7 3770 at stock should be enough, I can't really check. I only have my Haswell to test, which is already way faster.

I already tried that, but I didn't notice any difference in speed. I typically play with EFB to Ram and 1.5x resolution, and the game mostly runs fine expect for a select few areas.

Apart from that, other specific changes I make to my setup include:

Framelimit: Off
Limit by FPS (unchecked)
DSP LLE recompiler
DSP LLE on Separate Thread
Skip EFB Access From CPU
Cache Display Lists
OpenCL Texture Decoding

I read that OpenCL texture decoding works well with EFB set to Ram, so it was worth a shot. For the record, Resi 4 was even glitchier before I made these changes. The aiming reticule kept losing track of the Wiimote movements and got stuck somewhere on the screen, making targeting impossible. The game handles almost perfectly with the new setup, and the only graphical glitches are some rare twitchy polygons. Besides the FPS drop, I mean.

[Anti-Ultimate]

Don't use LLE. I don't think your PC can handle it honestly.

[JMC47]

DSP LLE hasn't been needed in GameCube games since late 3.5 days; and putting LLE on separate thread is just asking for trouble. It's very possible the game is doing something complicated with audio and the DSP alone is causing your slowdown; as I've seen happen in other games! Actually, I can pretty much guarantee DSP LLE on thread is slower if you're using a build where Cache Display Lists is still an option.

[Glitcher]

(04-25-2014, 05:24 AM)JMC47 Wrote: DSP LLE hasn't been needed in GameCube games since late 3.5 days; and putting LLE on separate thread is just asking for trouble.

I'm playing the Wii edition of Resi 4, not the Gamecube version. Anyway, I switched to HLE audio and wouldn't you know, it actually worked! The game runs much more smoothly. The worst framerate drop I experienced is around 20fps during the shootout in the castle (near the part where you have to align portraits of six doomed people), and even then it was a step up over the 10fps I was previously getting. I thought the LLE audio works best because that's what the Dolphin wiki recommended. I never thought the audio settings could affect the framerate to such a degree, because I didn't notice any real slowdown in other games. Anyway, thanks for your help, people!

[JMC47]

Apologies, but, Wii games also haven't needed LLE since the late 3.5 days . The rewrite affected most games.

And the Wiki... sorry about that. The Wiki tends to be pretty outdated, I'll make a note to fix it, thanks for pointing it out.

[Glitcher]

Thanks for letting me know. Also, a quick update: I downloaded the latest revision of Dolphin (4.0-1472 at the time of writing) and the game runs perfectly! There's no slowdown whatsoever. I don't know exactly what Dolphin Team did between this version and 4.0.2, but it worked wonders. Great stuff!

[JMC47]

Usually the latest versions are a bit slower (more accurate, emulate more stuff) but it's good to hear that some of the optimizations are starting to pay off. I'm actually starting a playthrough of Resident Evil 4 to check out the crash reported in the castle on the wiki page. If you get there and it crashes/doesn't crash, please let me know.