Super Mario Sunshine [hires texture pack]

[StripTheSoul]

Hm, are you sure you're using a new version of Dolphin? Load the upmost here: https://dolphin-emu.org/download/list/master/1/?nocr=true

[Sixyr]

Thought I was but apparently I was not! What a simple fix, I'm kicking myself haha. Thanks a lot.

[jazmac]

So I've managed to get the game working correctly with the hd textures in every respect except I'm experiencing frame stutters occasionally while moving around. I did have to switch to directx9 as I was experiencing graphical glitches in directx11, I tried running it with opengl instead but that didn't make a difference and I've tweaked around with the AA/graphic settings to see if anything helped and sadly it didn't.

I noticed a couple of other people having the same issue in this thread but nobody came up with a fix for it. Is this a trade off with using the hd textures or does someone know of a fix, thanks for your help.

[AnyOldName3]

There isn't a D3D9 any more. You're using a really old and slow build, and should upgrade to the latest dev. It's much faster, so your issue will be reduced.

[jazmac]

(01-09-2015, 11:14 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: There isn't a D3D9 any more. You're using a really old and slow build, and should upgrade to the latest dev. It's much faster, so your issue will be reduced.

Ye about 5mins after making my post I worked that one out and updated, the problem still persists however, I'm using dolphin 4.0-4980.

[StripTheSoul]

Hm, yeah, the textures are at 8x size which is veeery big.
I now have an SSD. I'll have to check out if the stutters still persist.

You could also try the Ishiiruka build with the Async shader cache compilation option enabled. That gets rid of all other stutters; maybe you're talking about those.
However, it's an unofficial build, so please don't ask for support when using it outside of its thread: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version

[Matti]

Thanks for this great texture pack.

I was also having issues with stuttering, even with the textures on an SSD. The Ishiiruka build seems to work, but has the disadvantage (from what I can tell) of requiring D3D for async shader compilation. On my system this means choosing between stuttering (OGL) or lower framerates (D3D with async compilation).

Here are two things I tried:
1. I ran OptiPNG on the directory (simply run optipng *.png). This reduced the total size of the textures from 316 MB to 278 MB, a decent savings but not enough to remove the stuttering.
2. Then I tried the nuclear option of batch resizing all files to half their original size. This actually doesn't seem to affect the quality much, at least on 1080p, though the difference might be more noticeable on higher resolutions. After running OptiPNG again the texture pack is now 81 MB, and the stuttering is gone!

Here's a quick comparison shot:

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

Original texture pack:

Textures resized to 50%:

At least on my system, this seems to be a good compromise between graphics and playability. Hope it helps.

[Tino]

if you uise ishiiruka you can convert the original textures to dds, the quality lost will be minimun and the stuttering will go away

[degasus]

@Tino: Is this stuttering because of png decoding or because of the big texture uploading? I guess it's the former, so just using bmp textures should also be fine...

We could also prefetch and decode all textures on startup, but I think this will be a huge waste of RAM.

[StripTheSoul]

Well, it would be a good utilization for the vram because it's not used so much by Dolphin (or is it? I actually don't really know). Of course this would have to be an option so that machines with low vram don't run into issues...