Anyone who's toyed around with Tatsunono vs. Capcom knows what I'm talking about. At certain moments, the emulation pauses for up to a few seconds, and during this time the audio loops the same clip about four times per second.
The phenomenon gives the sense that the emulation has to load something, and the game just has to wait until it's done loading. People have offered speculation that what it's loading at these times is new audio. The apparent evidence for this is the fact that a game like TvC loses the need to pause the game after one has been playing for a while.
My own guess is that it is moving graphics around. This is my guess because I get pauses often whenever all the game has to do is show some new character, or combination of characters, or graphics associated with special moves.
The reason I'm asking is a little complicated. Here's the situation: My brother is running a q9650 box with generally poor hardware (a rather out of date vid card, slow and heavily fragmented hdd, etc.) I'm using an i7 920, a Radeon 4870, and a WD Raptor. In theory, my pc ought to run emulators noticeably better than his. But he can get a rock solid 60fps in TvC (and NSMB and other games, for that matter) without any overclocking. I, on the other hand, get about 30fps in TvC and other games. I have to overclock my cpu to 4Ghz (from 2.66) to get a reliable 60fps. Our settings are the same; I'm the one who set up his Dolphin. (I need to stress this fact here and now: They are IDENTICAL. So the frame limiter, 3d plugin, dual cores, etc. are all accounted for.)
This boggles my mind. The only culprit is the stuttering pauses. On his machine, these pauses aren't that bad. In fact, the only time it can even really be noticed is during super moves. On my pc, however, I get pauses all the freaking time. Constantly. And they last a LOT longer. (Here's where I repeat the fact that I'm using a WD Raptor with zero fragmentation, whereas my brother either played straight off a disc or from his clunky hdd.)
This leads me to suspect that whatever mechanism is responsible for these pauses might also somehow be holding back my framerate. If I can learn what this mechanism is, perhaps I can take steps to rectify it. For example, what if stuff is being loaded into the 3d card's ram, and this is for some reason taking a lot longer on my pc than on my brothers? Well I could swap that card out and see what happens. Maybe it would then turn out that 3d card ram speed is what's inexplicably holding back a lot of other folks' framerates, too. Just a thought.
Anyway, if anyone has some insight, I'd love to hear it.
The phenomenon gives the sense that the emulation has to load something, and the game just has to wait until it's done loading. People have offered speculation that what it's loading at these times is new audio. The apparent evidence for this is the fact that a game like TvC loses the need to pause the game after one has been playing for a while.
My own guess is that it is moving graphics around. This is my guess because I get pauses often whenever all the game has to do is show some new character, or combination of characters, or graphics associated with special moves.
The reason I'm asking is a little complicated. Here's the situation: My brother is running a q9650 box with generally poor hardware (a rather out of date vid card, slow and heavily fragmented hdd, etc.) I'm using an i7 920, a Radeon 4870, and a WD Raptor. In theory, my pc ought to run emulators noticeably better than his. But he can get a rock solid 60fps in TvC (and NSMB and other games, for that matter) without any overclocking. I, on the other hand, get about 30fps in TvC and other games. I have to overclock my cpu to 4Ghz (from 2.66) to get a reliable 60fps. Our settings are the same; I'm the one who set up his Dolphin. (I need to stress this fact here and now: They are IDENTICAL. So the frame limiter, 3d plugin, dual cores, etc. are all accounted for.)
This boggles my mind. The only culprit is the stuttering pauses. On his machine, these pauses aren't that bad. In fact, the only time it can even really be noticed is during super moves. On my pc, however, I get pauses all the freaking time. Constantly. And they last a LOT longer. (Here's where I repeat the fact that I'm using a WD Raptor with zero fragmentation, whereas my brother either played straight off a disc or from his clunky hdd.)
This leads me to suspect that whatever mechanism is responsible for these pauses might also somehow be holding back my framerate. If I can learn what this mechanism is, perhaps I can take steps to rectify it. For example, what if stuff is being loaded into the 3d card's ram, and this is for some reason taking a lot longer on my pc than on my brothers? Well I could swap that card out and see what happens. Maybe it would then turn out that 3d card ram speed is what's inexplicably holding back a lot of other folks' framerates, too. Just a thought.
Anyway, if anyone has some insight, I'd love to hear it.