Sound glitches

lukalumen · 01-11-2019, 09:19 PM #1

Hi guys, I just tried Dolphin for the first time and love it, but there is one issue that is really not letting me enjoy the games. For now I tried New Super Mario and Mario Galaxy 2, but on both games I am getting really bad sound performance.
My phone has the Snapdragon 845 and 4GB of Ram, so it's not underpowered, since it's the best option on the market. Also, it makes no difference if I use 640p or 1080p... Even if I bump up AA and textures at 1080p, the game looks beautiful and plays well, the sound stutters the same at the lowest and highest settings.
Audio stretching makes it slightly more tolerable, but it's still pretty bad.

I went through 5 pages of this forum and been googling it, but it seems others are not experiencing this problem as much?

Is there anything I can do?

Thank you!

**JosJuice** · 01-11-2019, 09:56 PM #2

Does the game run at full speed (i.e. 60 fps for a 60 fps game)? If not, the audio will be slow and there is nothing you can do about it.

Keep in mind that not even the best phone there is is powerful enough to run every game at full speed. The Super Mario Galaxy series can be pretty demanding, but New Super Mario Bros. Wii should be less bad.

lukalumen · 01-11-2019, 10:14 PM #3

(01-11-2019, 09:56 PM)JosJuice Wrote: Does the game run at full speed (i.e. 60 fps for a 60 fps game)? If not, the audio will be slow and there is nothing you can do about it.

Keep in mind that not even the best phone there is is powerful enough to run every game at full speed. The Super Mario Galaxy series can be pretty demanding, but New Super Mario Bros. Wii should be less bad.

The FPS varies tremendously, but I don't think it's because of the power... It varies just the same if I play in 640p with the lowest settings and in 1080p with full on AA and filtering...

If the most powerful phone on the market is not powerful enough for it, what's the point?

***MayImilae*** · 01-11-2019, 10:30 PM #4

Dolphin is considerably more demanding than most other emulators. So yes, the most powerful phone on the market can only play a percentage of games at fullspeed, and that percentage shrinks significantly if you consider performance after ten minutes when the device has fully throttled. All of the really challenging games are out of reach for phones and will be for a loooong time!

**JosJuice** · 01-11-2019, 10:40 PM #5

(01-11-2019, 10:14 PM)lukalumen Wrote: The FPS varies tremendously, but I don't think it's because of the power... It varies just the same if I play in 640p with the lowest settings and in 1080p with full on AA and filtering...

The settings you mentioned only affect the GPU performance. The bottleneck is likely the CPU, which you can't really affect beyond turning down the Emulated CPU Clock setting.

(01-11-2019, 10:14 PM)lukalumen Wrote: If the most powerful phone on the market is not powerful enough for it, what's the point?

The reason Dolphin was ported to Android was because someone was interested in making an ARM version of Dolphin, more or less. If you think there isn't much point in using Dolphin on Android the way things are now, that's a pretty sensible conclusion that I can agree with. Hopefully in the future there'll be phones that can run Dolphin better.

lukalumen · 01-12-2019, 12:24 AM #6

(01-11-2019, 10:40 PM)JosJuice Wrote: The settings you mentioned only affect the GPU performance. The bottleneck is likely the CPU, which you can't really affect beyond turning down the Emulated CPU Clock setting.

The reason Dolphin was ported to Android was because someone was interested in making an ARM version of Dolphin, more or less. If you think there isn't much point in using Dolphin on Android the way things are now, that's a pretty sensible conclusion that I can agree with. Hopefully in the future there'll be phones that can run Dolphin better.

So the GPU is crazy fast now, able to render everything with the highest settings, but the CPU is bad on the Snapdragon Tongue

Since it has 8 cores, maybe it would help if Dolphin was able to utilise at least the 4 high powered ones, instead of only 2? Since most of the improvements they have been making recently involves the higher number of cores, I can imagine it will only get better when Dolphin can actually use them.

Make sense, thank you guys for your replies, I'll use it on my PC and try again when I get the incredible Sony XZ4 with the SD 855 proc Smile

**JosJuice** · 01-12-2019, 02:28 AM #7

(01-12-2019, 12:24 AM)lukalumen Wrote: So the GPU is crazy fast now, able to render everything with the highest settings, but the CPU is bad on the Snapdragon

It's not really that the CPU is that much worse than the GPU, it's more that emulation has a lot of CPU overhead but less GPU overhead.

(01-12-2019, 12:24 AM)lukalumen Wrote: Since it has 8 cores, maybe it would help if Dolphin was able to utilise at least the 4 high powered ones, instead of only 2? Since most of the improvements they have been making recently involves the higher number of cores, I can imagine it will only get better when Dolphin can actually use them.

Dolphin is only able to use one CPU core for emulating the GC/Wii CPU, and this will not change.

It's just the nature of emulation - GC/Wii games are made to run on one CPU core, so we can only use one CPU core for emulating the CPU. What we can do is use other cores to emulate other components like the GPU, but that only helps so much when the CPU emulation is what limits your performance.