Wario World catastrophic crash

[cammelspit]

Hi, everyone! I haven't had the need to post much here in a while because, frankly, Dolphin has been so stable I haven't had much in the way of issues. Especially since I did a recent upgrade to me PC. Unfortunately, there is always a time for major bugs and I was hoping to get someone else to help be confirm this before I go cluttering up the Dolphin issue tracker.

SO! I am playing Wario World NTSC-U at this point and have had some major issues here. This crash is reproducible, at least for me. What happens is when you hit start, AFTER the first memory card save has been created, just as Wario starts to jump into the frame the game, video driver, all of it has a hard meltdown. My TV goes completely black, no video output at all and I have to reset my PC the hard way by getting up and hitting the reset button and it boots fine. Now, I am using my steam controller, my new best friend, and the DX12 backend. My first thought was that the Steam overlay was doing some shenanigans again and after testing, still happened. I am using the 16/9 gecko code but disabling cheats didn't help either.

I changed the backend last because to my knowledge the settings I was using were working less than five minutes before, but change it I did. DX11 works a treat without the crash. I know I should just use the DX11 backend, and I am, no worries there but I have some thoughts on how this is behaving that might help in some way. If not then whatever but I am going to say it anyways.

1. UNLIKE DX11, DX12 seems to have the last rendered frame of whatever I was playing before pop up for a split second before it will start rendering anything from a new game I load.
2. If this phantom frame happens, and it does not always but often after the second game load from a clean boot, Dolphin will become unstable and is almost assured to just crash out very soon. As in withing about 10 minutes nearly always.
3. I have dabbled a bit in the CEMU emulator just for kicks in the last week or so and, funny enough, their latest 1.4.1 crashes in EXACTLY the same way at the MK8 loading screen. no video output and everything but they use OpenGL exclusively.
4. I am using the latest AMD 16.3 drivers and they are seemingly having issues with others randomly describing some similar crashing with unrelated games/emulators and such.
   

These are the reasons I think I am experiencing perhaps a driver bug? Maybe something specific to an AMD card that hasn't been uncovered until Dolphin is using certain DX12 features or CEMU using OpenGL in a strange way. Sorry about even mentioning CEMU but since the crash is precisely identical in every way I figured it may be relevant for troubleshooting at least.

Here are my specs as I am sure this will be needed for anyone who might want to attempt to recreate this specific issue for me.

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K @4.5Ghz GPU: Sapphire R9-380 OC @ ~1010Mhz OS: WIndows10 Pro x64

BTW, I also use my IGPU regularly for Quick Sync so it is on and as I stated before I usually use my steam controller and it's overlay hooks into the render pipeline in some strange ways but I DID test without it and it still happened.

Thank you to anyone who can help me confirm!

EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to mention I am using 16GB DDR4 @3000 and my Dolphin build is 4.0-9211

[JosJuice]

Does it work if you use this PR build? http://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-3713-dolphin-latest-x64.7z

[MayImilae]

cammelspit Wrote:CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K @4.5Ghz GPU: Sapphire R9-380 OC @ ~1010Mhz OS: WIndows10 Pro x64

First step: undo the overclocks! Especially the GPU overclock. Then if it still occurs, buy an Nvidia GPU. :3

[cammelspit]

(04-24-2016, 07:47 AM)MaJoR Wrote: First step: undo the overclocks! Especially the GPU overclock. Then if it still occurs, buy an Nvidia GPU. :3

GPU is not overclocked any over stock. This is a factory job. I also dont want to pay 80$ more to get a card that equals this one in performance. Right now, I would HAVE to go with a 970 since a 960 is not as performant and costs more. I reinstalled my Windows and it has mitigated a few issues, but there is still something not right when it comes to the DX12 backend with Wario World. If anyone else can replicate this problem then maybe there can be a major bug sussed out. This is the real reason I even posted at all. Just trying to help.

[MayImilae]

The CPU overclock could also be a factor.