[Wii] Super Mario Galaxy

[Suprvgeta]

(12-17-2013, 06:36 PM)TwoHundredPercent Wrote: I'm using the latest version of Dolphin, and am running on an i5 4670k (overclocked), 16GB ram and an HD5870 (still waiting for a decently cooled R9 290), and am getting 60fps at all times. The sound is perfect with LLE as well. One problem however, the sound seems to be a moment delayed behind what's happening on screen. If I jump, the "Woo! Woohoo!" sounds are always a moment behind Mario jumping. I have LLE on a seperate thread, OpenAL and using the LLE recompiler. I tried adding DSP files, but then I get a prompt about it being an old ROM, and only Zelda Ucode will work correctly. And the sound still lags.

What am I doing wrong?

Really? What IR are you running at on LLE? I also have an i5-4670k overclocked to 4.3ghz, 8GB of RAM, and a Geforce GTX 780 and get horrible frame drops when trying to play over 2.5x IR w/ LLE enabled (this is using xaudio2 and OpenGL - LLE on a separate thread enabled and disabled - doesn't seem to make a difference). The purple coin level on the sand storm level (forget the name of it, but it has the instant death sand and the tornadoes you can helicopter twirl in) was darn near unplayable w/ all of the slow-down. However using 4x IR w/ 2x AA and 16x AF when using HLE audio the game runs a near consistent 60fps.

[JMC47]

Open AL audio backend is slow; that's all there is to it.

[BFGZone]

Hey guys, I've been playing this game with the latests revisions of Dolphin and a pretty powerful PC, but, there is one place in the game (so far) where my FPS dips a LOT. While investigating the issue, I found out that disabling Anti-aliasing solves the issue. To illustrate:

~43fps with 4x SSAA
http://postimg.org/image/nck03xy47/full/

~94fps with no AA
http://postimg.org/image/l6pp9funr/full/

Each AA setting will progressively degrade performance, but only inside this mini stage. In any other game, or any other area of this game, so far, fps will dip at most 4fps.

This area is found in Beach Bowl Galaxy (In the Kitchen hub, or whatever they call it), inside a green pipe, fairly close to the beginning:
http://postimg.org/image/kwi6q3g1j/full/

I haven't been able to find anyone else talking about this. Is this common or known? I guess this is a frame-buffer heavy area because of the wavy effect over the whole screen, which AA might work with lots of overhead. I would appreciate if anyone could confirm this issue. Maybe it's specific to OGL/Linux?

NOTES: All of these screen-shots were taken without vsync nor framelimit. I'm running a core i7 4770k @ 4.2GHz and a modest but competent (for dolphin) geforce 450GTS. My system is Arch Linux, nvidia 331.38, kernel 3.12.9.

[Shonumi]

I'd reckon that the results you're getting are pretty much to be expected. The SMG games are both very GPU intensive in certain spots (sometimes entire levels?). 4xSSAA can be particularly demanding since it renders the current scene with 4 times as many pixels before doing any further processing. So even at 1x IR + 4xSSAA, you're forcing your GPU to compute what a 2x IR scene looks like before SSAA does any anti-aliasing (and performing the AA itself takes time). Seeing the performance drop like that isn't surprising at all, especially since your GPU isn't the strongest.

You can find these GPU hotspots all over the SMG games. If you play at high IRs and/or with high AA, or if you disable the framelimit, you'll probably notice them more often. So in short, this is nothing unusual. It actually kind of shows you how Nintendo went out of their way to make Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 visually impressive (pure speculation of course :p).

[JMC47]

You're GPU limited; something I don't say often in Dolphin.

[BFGZone]

AA seems to definitely be the culprit here. Dolphin manages 60fps at 4x IR + Scaled EFB Copy, and 89fps at 2x IR + Scaled EFB Copy. As soom as I turn AA on, even the lowest one, performance drops like a rock. Much more than 4xSSA in the previous example. FXAA works fine since it's a post processing effect, but for some reason dolphins implementation makes some hard edges look weird. Of course, this all takes place inside the crazy frame-buffer heavy room.

I'm still a bit suspicious about the opengl plugin because I really haven't seen any performance dip other than in this situation, though, I also found another spot in the game where a similar effect is applied while you are touching extremely cold water.

Anyway, I may be in for a GPU upgrade.... which I was holding off because this CPU was expensive enough ><

[Shonumi]

Well, other games aren't usually as GPU intensive as SMG, so not seeing this behavior elsewhere doesn't surprise me. MK Wii or Xenoblade Chronicles have some pretty GPU intensive sections (MK Wii more so than XBC in my experience) so you might want to do comparisons there.

Again, keep in mind that SSAA is a very demanding form of AA, much more so than FXAA or MSAA. It wouldn't surprise me that it's slower than 4x IR either given that the scaling it applies is more complex than Dolphin's (when Dolphin shrinks a 4x image to your screen I mean) and the Dolphin SSAA code might not be the fastest implementation (just a guess here). Since your GPU isn't the fastest, whatever SSAA does aside from rendering the image at 2x your chosen IR seems to be causing slowdowns.

[eclipsezeromh]

Hey guys, need a small amount of help here, nothing related to the emulation itself thankfully.
I just reached the ray surfing part(loopdeeloop galaxy or something)....and I have no idea what the controls are.
I am using a PS3 controller with Better DS3(automatic X360 profile btw), and I have no idea what controls to set on it to allow me to to surf
Anyone know which buttons I have to set(for ray surfing), and for that matter have tips on where to set them on a PS3 controller?
EDIT:
Nvm, got through it, and Rolling Greens.
Might as well take the chance to thank the Dolphin devs, if it weren't for this ridiculous/awesome emulator, I would never have played this and other amazing games <3

[Aeon]

Hey guys! I have a weird problem. I'm running SMG with 60+ FPS (constantly) which should be sufficient to have a smooth gaming experience. In fact it does not feel so. Every once in a while the game seems to stutter. Well, I don't know if you can really call it stuttering, but it doesn't feel smooth. It's hard to describe. It seems to me, that the emulation is slowing down in certain situations (i.e. turning around fast) although the framerate does not drop below 60. In fact I'm forced to limit the framerate, otherwise the emulation would be going to fast. Now I'm wondering, are my eyes playing a prank on me or is something going wrong?

[skid]

I did not notice anything like that when I played this game. It might be your eyes playing tricks.