Sudden unexpected slowdown in majority of games

01-22-2014, 01:20 PM #1

Hello,

I've been using Dolphin 4.0 since around the day it was released, and had little to no issues running games like Smash Bros Brawl at a perfect 60fps at 3x resolution... up until a couple days ago.

Mysteriously, without having changed any settings, (the only one changed from default is the internal resolution) Brawl and many other games began to have notable slowdowns to anywhere from 20-45fps. I've tried looking for a root cause, and I can tell it's not my laptop, as all other games and emulators I have run just fine. I can only assume something went wrong with Dolphin. Yet despite several reinstalls and updating to 4.0.2 as well as trying the current dev version (689), the issue persists. I'm even noticing some slight framerate drops at the native resolution.

It could possibly also be a driver update screwed with something Dolphin-related, but I really doubt that's the case. I'm not sure I have a way to roll back to a good configuration if that is the case. I'm still testing a few things, but if anyone has any ideas, I'd appreciate it.

EDIT: Not sure if it's worth noting, but I've only listed the Intel Integrated graphics in my system specs because that's all Dolphin recognizes. My laptop also has an nVidia NVS 5400 card in it, but I've yet to figure out how to make it work with Dolphin.

**skid** · 01-22-2014, 03:02 PM #2

Dolphin's settings are now stored under Documents/Dolphin Emulator. Try clearing out this folder before reinstalling.

The graphics settings for for D3D has a pulldown to select the graphics card that Dolphin will use.

01-23-2014, 04:33 AM #3

(01-22-2014, 03:02 PM)skid Wrote: Dolphin's settings are now stored under Documents/Dolphin Emulator. Try clearing out this folder before reinstalling.

The graphics settings for for D3D has a pulldown to select the graphics card that Dolphin will use.

This is slightly off-center here, but I too have problems when I tried the latest revision of Dolphin. The one I'm using is 4.0.2 though, and yet, the emulator crashes randomly. I never had this happen to me at all before. Even pausing the game's emulation won't stop the crash from happening, so I have to export the movie input file every so often just to keep them. Even so, the video doesn't result in a speed-up for recording, and I really want to do standard recording without the crashes(older revisions video playback is almost 1.8x as fast as the game play should be in real-time). Tweaking the settings around does nothing to help. I only experienced the crashes in "Zelda TWW" however(though I never tried other games).

Yes, 'Panic Handlers' option is enabled, but no message pops-up telling me what is happening, no error log file output either.

**KHg8m3r** · 01-23-2014, 05:15 AM #4

Try these:
1) Update drivers, Windows updates, DirectX Web updater (some components may be missing), and latest version of Visual C++
2) Make sure under Power Management in Windows you're running in High Performance, and are plugged in to power
3) Use the OpenGL backend on one of the latest dev builds, as it is faster than D3D. The current dev build is 4.0-689

@Stingerman06: your CPU is pretty weak for Dolphin, just so you know

01-23-2014, 07:02 AM #5

(01-23-2014, 05:15 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Try these:
1) Update drivers, Windows updates, DirectX Web updater (some components may be missing), and latest version of Visual C++
2) Make sure under Power Management in Windows you're running in High Performance, and are plugged in to power
3) Use the OpenGL backend on one of the latest dev builds, as it is faster than D3D. The current dev build is 4.0-689

@Stingerman06: your CPU is pretty weak for Dolphin, just so you know

I'm aware of this, though when I get a better CPU with better specs, I'll be running the later Dolphin builds much more often.

1. Up-to-date.
2. I always run the computer like this.
3. Switching to OpenGL didn't give any performance boost on the speed.

I have one last question however. At which is the latest build of Dolphin that doesn't have the potential to crash with smooth recording playback? The one I use that has no crash(at all, unless the game runs dual core, then there is a potential crash result) is 3.5-367, yet the playback on the recording to dump frames and audio isn't well synced. The video has a massive speed-up near the beginning of the recording but smooths out after about 5-10 seconds.

At this point I think it has something to do with the emulator's frame feedback. The codec's work find with other emulators, no problems but de-syncs happen near the start of the recording with Dolphin, and in-between screen transitions. The audio plays perfectly fine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUZqvX4_MnU

This is a video I uploaded to get help on the problem I was looking for, but so far, I'm not sure what build I'm looking for that can work without crashes.