Wind Waker Freezes with Pictogreaph

[ink_Ribbon]

Well, I have a notebook with a CPU i5-3230, 4GB RAM and an Intel Graphics 4000. Even tough everyone here said it would not be possible (XD) I can run Wind Waker 2x with a 30FPS constant rate falling to 28 in some specific and short ocasions with Dolphin 3.0 used for benchmark of this game. Thing is, everytime I try to get a pictograph the game freezes in a black screen with white lines pointing to the center of the camera lens. Making some tests I found out that I had to keep "EFB Copies = RAM" cheked, but this slows down the game to 24-20 FPS.

Is there anyway I can take pictographs without freezing my screen or slowing down the game? Plus, why doesn't Dolphin 4.0 run WW at the same speed with the same configuration?

[pauldacheez]

There's no "best of both worlds" here – either turn on EFB to RAM whenever you want to use the Picto Box or don't use it at all. Or get better hardware (or a real console) to run the game on.

As of 4.0, the game automatically uses DSP LLE, which increases the CPU requirement substantially but fixes a major issue with the game – with HLE, the game occasionally hangs during cutscenes, door transitions, etc., and I was *really* fucking tired of people complaining about the issue, so I asked a dev to make it always use LLE. And that just resulted in more complaints! What a country, always finding something perfectly legitimate yet practically unfixable to whine about.

[ink_Ribbon]

(03-09-2014, 03:26 PM)pauldacheez Wrote: There's no "best of both worlds" here – either turn on EFB to RAM whenever you want to use the Picto Box or don't use it at all. Or get better hardware (or a real console) to run the game on.

As of 4.0, the game automatically uses DSP LLE, which increases the CPU requirement substantially but fixes a major issue with the game – with HLE, the game occasionally hangs during cutscenes, door transitions, etc., and I was *really* fucking tired of people complaining about the issue, so I asked a dev to make it always use LLE. And that just resulted in more complaints! What a country, always finding something perfectly legitimate yet practically unfixable to whine about.

First of all, I'm not complaining nor whining, I'm asking legitimate questions in the support section of the emulator forum, if you are so pissed about it you don't really have to answer, I'm not putting a gun to your head.
Second: What country? I'm Brazilian and don't have anything to do with whatever you think about your own country.

I'm a student, I'm don't have money nor time to spend around buying every console and super PC hardware. If I wanted a console I would not download the emulator.

Anyways, I really don't want to fight over this, specially on the internet. As I said I have 4GB of RAM... To get the pictograph I need to check the "EFB Copies = RAM" box in the "hacks" section, which makes the FPS drop... Does anyone know if, if I put more 2 or 4GB there, I would be able to play without lag?

Thank you very much for your attention.

[JMC47]

The reason it was perceived as whining, rightfully or not, is that we get a lot of complaints about performance. My first reaction was the same. EFB2Texture is a hack to make the emulator run faster at the expense of accuracy. So, in saying "Can I get full speed + accuracy" comes off as a bit uninformed, especially to us that handle these questions all the time. I'll do my best to explain.

Currently, what Wind Waker does for the pictobox cannot be emulated through EFB2Texture for various reasons, and requires EFB2Ram. EFB2Ram is not limited by how much ram you have, but rather processing speed. I do not know if it's even possible for EFB2Texture to ever support this feature.

Why doesn't Dolphin run as fast on 4.0 by default? Because it runs better! In modern development builds, almost every single graphical bug present in prior builds have been fixed. Hell, in the Tev_Fixes_New branch there are zero known graphical bugs remaining in Wind Waker! By forcing LLE audio by default (which, the user can override if they prefer speed over accuracy) we make it so the game doesn't crash as easily, and hopefully more users have a better experience. Unfortunately, many users prefer speed over stability.

My suggestion is to only turn on EFB2Ram when you take the pictures and then turn it back off when you're done. It's not the perfect solution, but I do know it works fairly well. Also, you could try using different graphics backends + settings (Such as Vertex Streaming Hack in OpenGL on 4.0; or, if you have a fairly modern card, the automatic buffer streaming stuff in latest development builds.)

Basically, higher accuracy uses more resources which makes the game slower.

[MayImilae]

Technically EFB to Ram isn't any more accurate than EFB to Texture, because there is no way to do what the GC/Wii do. On the consoles, the ram is shared between the system and the graphics chip. On our PCs that isn't the case, so you have to move things to either the system memory or the GPU memory. For most things that works fine, but for EFB Copies... not so much. EFB to Ram allows CPU access, but slows down GPU access considerably making the game slower. EFB to Texture allows the GPU ready access so it's nice and fast, but slows down CPU access or blocks it entirely. Neither situation really replicates the original hardware very well, but EFB to Ram is closest since the game needs to make EFB changes on the fly via the CPU. ...which I guess makes it more accurate. I'll shut up now.

[ink_Ribbon]

Well, thank you very much for explaining everything so patiently, I really appreciate it. You see, I made the link in my mind between the word RAM in the emulator and the common RAM memory, my mistake... And was just curious about why I couldn't reach the same speed with Dolphin 4.0 than with 3.0 in my tests.

I appreciate very much the people who do these jobs... Emulator, homebrews, fan translations.... And I understand how annoying it is when people complain about something they have for free. I played a lot of fan-translated games when I was younger and soon learned a little of romhacking. Now that I do speak English I'm participating in a Portuguese translation project for PS3. Next week I start at Computer Science college, then I'll understand a little bit more about all this. I hope to become a partner of yours in no time.

Once again, thank you for your attention.