Something is making Dolphin 3.5 and newer run much slower

[fyy]

*UPDATE*

The issue occurs at Dolphin 3.0-629 and later, all the way up to 4.0+. It does NOT occur on Dolphin 3.0-601 and earlier. Link seems to have found the issue: https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/detail?id=5666 , although it doesn't seem to be completely caused by just Savestates, as others have pointed out.



Original post

System:

Core 2 Quad Q6600
Radeon HD4830 512MB
4GB DDR800
Windows 8.1 Pro


This isn't the fastest system in the world, but the difference between running Dolphin 3.0 and 3.5 or higher is unbelievable. In 3.0 I can run 2x Internal Res, 4xAA, 1440x900 and get a solid 100% "SPEED" while playing Resident Evil Remake.

In 3.5+, no matter what I do, I can't even run it in 1x Internal and no AA without it running as a slow motion fest. Something is definitely up.

Just curious if anyone else had this issue? Changing Direct3D / OpenGL doesn't make a difference. No settings seem to make a difference. 3.0 out of the box runs great, and 3.5+ all run terribly.


Anyone else have similar issues?

[DJBarry004]

Tried overclocking? Also, newer dev builds should give a speed up instead of slow down, try on lowest settings possible. Make sure neither CPU or GPU are overheating/throttling.

[JMC47]

I think the problem is everything with that computer, not Dolphin.

I'll try to explain this as best as I can for you, please understand that I'm not insulting you or your computer, I just want to explain what's going on.

As Dolphin progresses, it emulates the GameCube and Wii more accurately. It has higher compatibility, more features, optimizations, etc. As we emulate things more accurately, the emulator gets slower, and thus some versions won't be quite as fast as others.

Counteracting that is optimizations. This happens on both sides; as Dolphin gets new developers and ideas, it can optimize things. Faster CPU emulation, GPU emulation etc. On the other side, new GPU drivers, CPU architectures get new features that we can take advantage of to get faster performance. Sometimes we have to sacrifice performance on certain configurations in order to help the greater good. When OpenGL was rewritten for GLSL, it did wonders for it to take advantage of newer GPUs and features, like Buffer_Storage. Your GPU is extremely old. Hell, my secondary card, HD5850 is slow enough for me to lose half of my speed in any game on a Core i5 3570K. GPUs DO matter, and yours doesn't make the cut. Your CPU is also extremely old, your motherboard is obviously pretty old; not even DDR3 ram, etc.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Dolphin is a faster, more optimized program than it was before while increasing emulation accuracy. Your computer is so old that it can't take advantage of all of the optimizations, and can't handle the better emulation given by the newer builds, so you get a slower experience.

[fyy]

Yes my CPU is pretty old and lacks newer instructions like SSE4.1, my GPU in a similar state. I'm well aware of my systems limitations, but the performance difference between your major builds does not justify it. They sound like mostly excuses to me, in fact with all the great news about Fiora's massive optimization improvements, it makes me think something must have gone terribly wrong between 3.0 and until then.

I understand that Dolphin also can't make much use of quad cores, which especially hurts me being on a Q6600, since it has slower single threaded performance compared to newer CPUs - it can't even flex its quad muscles to make up for it. It's just a mystery how 3.0 can run so good and the others so bad. It's not a "hardware" issue unless you all are making the emulation accuracy like 50000x better.

Like I said, With Dolphin 3.0. I can run 2x Internal Res, 4xAA, 1440x900 and it emulates at perfect speed. If I get Dolphin 3.5 or higher its a slow motion fest even at 1x Internal, 0 AA and Windowed mode.

I'm very tempted to download every single 3.0 dev release up to 3.5 to pinpoint where it happens at.

[AnyOldName3]

3.5 is pretty much the slowest Dolphin's ever been. If you're on a computer supporting all the latest and greatest optimisations, then the latest development build should be the fastest Dolphin's ever been (since it gained the ability to actually run a single game right through), as well as being the most accurate.

[Aleron Ives]

Don't bother; those versions are so out of date that they have little to do with Dolphin's current state. Newer versions provide better emulation and consequently need a faster CPU to run. Yours is not fast enough, so you can either continue to use old versions (and all the bugs they contain that are fixed in the latest development builds), or you can upgrade your PC to have hardware that can handle current versions of Dolphin. You don't even need the latest Intel CPU (Haswell) for most games, but buying a Haswell Pentium would give you even better speed and lower cost than a high-end Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge CPU.

[fyy]

Well this is interesting, I downloaded a bunch of 3.0 dev builds, and they all run around "as slow" as the newer builds. The "stable" Dolphin 3.0 from 3 years 4 months ago runs flawlessly though, completely great performance, and was the one I'm comparing the rest against. I went back as far as I could in the dev release for 3.0 but it only goes to version 3.0-749 which is dated at 2 years 2 months ago.

So something that was added in between 3 years 4 months ago and 2 years 2 months ago is causing the issue for me. I'm gonna test some other stuff.

Also, anyone know of a place to get Dolphin builds older than 3.0-749, that's the furthest back the official dev build page goes.

[DJBarry004]

https://dl.dolphin-emu.org/oldbuilds/

Someone might have said this already, but I´ll do it "again" just in case: old builds are NOT SUPPORTED here. If you find bugs in these, we simply won´t help (since most of them are solved on newer builds, as someone said before).

[NaturalViolence]

Check for changes in the game .ini for newer builds. Newer builds likely have slower more accurate settings forced on through the game .ini

[fyy]

Alright, I've narrowed it down to something that was changed in between 3.0-601 and 3.0-629. The changelog doesn't hold any clues though. With 3.0-629 and newer (up to 4.0) I get crap framerates, but with 601 and older I get flawless framerates. There's no versions in between these 2 releases I can keep comparing, the filesize of Dolphin.exe is different by about 10,000 bytes.

I ran a FC and none of the game ini's were changed.