Wind Waker micro stutter

[Zelnick]

I started playing Wind Waker with Dolphin 4.0-1478 and even though it says I have a steady 30 FPS I've been experiencing a very annoying micro stuttering problem.

I've attached an image of my settings for Dolphin and my machine specs along with my Nvidia control panel settings.

Here are two videos of the micro stuttering:

http://www.mediafire.com/watch/0jain76s4q72jag/output1.webm
http://www.mediafire.com/watch/xkntppjkpt8v3p3/output2.webm

I've played at both native resolution and 4xIR and I get the same result.

[SugokuPuddi]

I don't know exactly because I use OpenGL, but what if you downgrade your nVidia drivers to 332.21 and try it with OpenGL?
Also, try setting the AF in your nvidia control center to Application Controled and Maximum Pre Rendered frames to the default (3) and Vertical Sync to off and enable it via Dolphin if needed.

Also, do you need the EFB? I remember that it works fine with it being disabled.

Try that if something fixes your problems.

[DJBarry004]

Almost all the games need EFB on...

[kinkinkijkin]

Oh, that's easy. Try disabling VSync. It's looking quite like a little thing with your GPU drawing frames a little fast, and VSync causing the video to skip. Or, whatever it is that causes the little jumps with VSync. I've never been entirely sure, really.

[Zelnick]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

I did as you suggested SugokuPuddi and returned my AF and maximum pre rendered frames to the default and disable v-sync in the control panel but it didn't help

kinkinkijkin, I also disabled v-sync completely in the control panel as well as the emulator but that also didn't help.

I started fiddling with the hacks section and found that disabling the external frame buffer helped out immensely but I would still get a stutter or two every so often. I then also disabled EFB copies and that removed all stuttering. Does this game rely on using the EFB in a way that would affect play?

[DJBarry004]

A lot. Most games need EFB on for the graphic effects to show correctly/aren´t missing.

[kinkinkijkin]

You should only ever have the XFB enabled for games that actually need it.

This game relies on the EFB quite a bit, but I'm going to guess that you didn't disable it through the gamesettings.ini, so it's actually still enabled.

[Zelnick]

(04-28-2014, 10:39 AM)kinkinkijkin Wrote: You should only ever have the XFB enabled for games that actually need it.

This game relies on the EFB quite a bit, but I'm going to guess that you didn't disable it through the gamesettings.ini, so it's actually still enabled.

The XFB being enabled appeared to be causing the majority of the stuttering.

The emulator says that the option "EFBCopyEnable" is overridden by the game ini when I start Wind Waker, however when I leave it enabled I still get a small bit of stuttering and when I disable it the game no longer stutters at all.

[JMC47]

EFB Copies communicate to your video card from the emulator, so it's likely that the latency of communicating with the video card is causing the microstutter.