Wii games capped at 45-55 FPS w/ stuttering on High-End Hardware

[Mario119]

Hey all,

I recently upgraded to a new Gaming PC, as my old one was getting a tad dated. One of the first things I installed on the PC was Dolphin, and I couldn't wait to play my favorite games at 4K Resolution. However, I ran into a problem almost immediately.. GameCube games work wonderfully, just as expected. However, Wii games are a different story. Upon launch, they stutter a fair amount. Once you get into actual Gameplay though, they stutter quite a bit, and the framerate wildly fluctuates in the 45-55FPS range, never touching 60FPS. Even if I turn Dolphin on all the most accurate settings and Native resolution, same problem. My hardware should be able to deal with it, as you can see below. It gets normal scores in benchmarks and does great in gaming. Even Cemu runs at 60FPS on it, so it seems to just be Dolphin. I'm running the latest dev-build on Direct3D 12, and I've even tried the unofficial Ishiiruka branch. Same problem, sadly.. I'm also on the latest drivers available for all the components in my PC. Other backends seem to be problematic as well.

Thanks for the help in advance, guys.

Specs:

Intel i7-6700k @ 4.6GHz
AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB
16GB DDR4-2666MHz

[KHg8m3r]

Did you make sure you have v-sync off in Dolphin?
Also please post pictures of your Dolphin settings so we can see what you have enabled and whatnot?

[Mario119]

(08-23-2016, 11:13 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Did you make sure you have v-sync off in Dolphin?
Also please post pictures of your Dolphin settings so we can see what you have enabled and whatnot?

I usually use vSync, but I tried turning it off and playing again. Nothing changed, unfortunately

You can find my settings here:
http://imgur.com/a/kqYFc

[admin89]

It could be a driver / compatibility issue , make sure you use latest driver . Other RX 480 users said they have a lot of crashes with Dolphin

[KHg8m3r]

While running a game, see what your CPU/GPU clock speeds are and make sure they're going up to full speed.

[Mario119]

(08-23-2016, 01:45 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: While running a game, see what your CPU/GPU clock speeds are and make sure they're going up to full speed.

GPU core and memory are both at full speed, CPU is not. I've thought of that before, and put my CPU into High-Performance (100% Speed) mode so it was running at max clocks, nothing improved :/

(08-23-2016, 12:02 PM)admin89 Wrote: It could be a driver / compatibility issue , make sure you use latest driver . Other RX 480 users said they have a lot of crashes with Dolphin

I've tried multiple AMD Crimson drivers, ranging from 16.7.1 all the way to 16.8.2. Nothing changed, though.

[Anti-Ultimate]

The RX 480 performing bad in Dolphin seems to be a common issue, see here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4qmwfv/discussion_rx_480_amd_gpus_and_emulation/
https://community.amd.com/thread/202563
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA--zryhs7c

I'm not really a Graphics API guy, but I don't think it's really related to Dolphin itself. You might want to report this to AMD.

[KHg8m3r]

My only other thought is to remove your R9 480 and try running off the Intel iGPU and see if games run at full speed to isolate the R9 480 to see if it may be the problem.

When changing between GPU drivers, did you use the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) tool to completely remove all the data from your system?

[Mario119]

(08-23-2016, 07:13 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: My only other thought is to remove your R9 480 and try running off the Intel iGPU and see if games run at full speed to isolate the R9 480 to see if it may be the problem.

When changing between GPU drivers, did you use the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) tool to completely remove all the data from your system?

I tried the Intel HD Graphics 530 (which is the i7-6700K's iGPU) and everything worked as it should. I did have to lower the resolution to 1.5x Native, of course. However, after tinkering with the settings a bit I found that changing XFB from Virtual to Disabled made the FPS a locked 60FPS again. That's just one part of the problem though. First off, some games I run (such as Rhythm Heaven Fever) require XFB Emulation for certain parts to function right. Most importantly however, I'm still experiencing crashes/visual corruption in Super Mario Galaxy 2 (which is my favorite game). I was going to make a thread for this problem alone, maybe I still should. Once you start it up, artifacts start cropping up everywhere. When you load into the actual game (not the menus), it crashes with a black screen. I don't know if Dolphin produces logs or not, I couldn't seem to find any. If someone could tell me where they're located, I'd be more than happy to provide a crash log/dump.

To your other question, yes I did indeed use DDU between drivers.

[KHg8m3r]

I'm pretty sure that games that require XFB will turn it on as needed, so you can leave it off in the main settings.
Did you make sure you have the latest Intel drivers? I know that's an issue with Intel that they have corruption on some older drivers.