Skyward Sword micro stuttering, probably HDD

[Axxer]

I'm having some very annoying stuttering issues with Skyward Sword, and it can be very distracting. Some examples of this are:

1) Turning around in Skyloft causes a stutter (I'm assuming this is a texture loading problem)
2) Bringing out my sword for the first time/swinging it at an enemy causes a stutter

All of these "stutters" are basically freezes in the game temporarily that result in a drop in FPS/VPS for one refresh of the measurement (but it definitely looks like a disc I/O or loading issue).

The thing is, my computer (specs in sig) is very good for Dolphin except for one thing: the HDD. It is an old, unused, 5400 RPM SATA 2. Am I gonna need to change that?

My settings are this:
Graphics > General: d3d11, hide mouse cursor, full screen
> Enhancements: 2x IR, Scaled EFB copy, per pixel lighting
> Hacks: ignore format changes, efb to texture, fast texture accuracy, no Xfb, openmp
> advanced: progressive scan

I'm using jit, auto frame limit, LLE audio (on thread) and dsound/xaudio2

[admin89]

Enable Vbeam ?
Intel SSD 330 120GB (100$) is good enough . Intel SSD is very durable unlike the others

[Shonumi]

You could probably examine if this issue is related to disc I/O if you just monitored it while playing Dolphin. Naturally, you'd want to eliminate as many programs in the background as possible to reduce interference when looking at your disc I/O.

[Axxer]

I tried vbeam, but it just slowed down the game and the stuttering didn't go away.

I'll try to monitor the HDD usage. Are there any good programs for that? Just use built in windows utilities?

[Shonumi]

You'd probably want to start with something like Process Explorer; I believe can monitor disc I/O. I've never used it myself though.

[DefenderX]

Try to check the OpenMP Texture Decoder. It CAN fix micro stuttering.

[Axxer]

(08-28-2012, 05:17 PM)DefenderX Wrote: Try to check the OpenMP Texture Decoder. It CAN fix micro stuttering.

I did that, didn't help

[NaturalViolence]

Have you tried changing the audio frontend to HLE?

[Axxer]

I haven't tried HLE, I'll see what it does.

I would prefer to run the game in LLE though because HLE almost always has issues. I'm willing TI use HLE to find the problem though.

[delroth]

Try using an async-dvd build: http://dolphin-emu.org/download/list/async-dvd/1/

These should fix stuttering due to slow HDDs. It's a development branch though, so there might be other issues.