Zelda Skyward Sword sound and overall performance issues

[DarkeoX]

Hello all !
I want to get some advices from some Dolphin and emulation gurus that roam around this forum.
I have the specs that you can see in my signature, and though I'm being able to run TLZ : SS at 2x native rez without much trouble, I keep getting small sound cracks/stutters that annoy me quite much, as well as small and repeated little (little in time because I can loose around 10 fps which is quite much) drops in fps.
I'm not using AA, Force Textures filtering (x16), V-Sync enabled, I've tried both OpenGL and DX 11 and the sound problem (HLE on Xaudio2) still won't go away. Can someone provide me some helpful advice ? Also sometimes, in open spaces (like village plaza) I get 2-fps drops before going to 30 fps again. Is my hardware still not good enough ?

[LordVador]

(10-12-2013, 08:01 AM)DarkeoX Wrote: Is my hardware still not good enough ?

You'll have to overclock for this game.

[pauldacheez]

In addition to overclocking, use OpenGL with "Vertex Streaming Hack" checked – it works wonders on Nvidia GPUs. (Same thing works on Linux, just make sure to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers.)

As is well-explained repeatedly throughout the forums, sound will stutter if the game's not running at full speed. You can partially avoid this by using the OpenAL audio backend, which timestretches the audio so that it just smoothly lowers the tempo instead of stuttering. (It adds a large amount of latency and/or tends to crackle, though.)

[DarkeoX]

Thanks for your advices. I safely OCed to 4.2 Ghz and indeed, game is doing much fine. However I still a get a "bit" of those sudden fps drops, especially in special events, like the Sword charging up for energy wave or at the beginning of a battle. First sword hit would make the whole game skip some frames, but after that, every thing does fine. Is that just me ?

[pauldacheez]

Sounds like overclocking even further might be desirable. I've seen plenty of folks around who have their 3570K at 4.4-4.8 GHz, so if that's not out of the question for them, it might not be out of the question for you. (Winter's coming up, too, so the cold will let you overclock more, eh?)

If you feel it's necessary, a better cooler won't be too expensive. These are the two I keep recommending to people.
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-cpu-cooler-rr212e20pkr2
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/noctua-cpu-cooler-nhd14

[DarkeoX]

(10-13-2013, 12:44 PM)pauldacheez Wrote: Sounds like overclocking even further might be desirable. I've seen plenty of folks around who have their 3570K at 4.4-4.8 GHz, so if that's not out of the question for them, it might not be out of the question for you. (Winter's coming up, too, so the cold will let you overclock more, eh?)

If you feel it's necessary, a better cooler won't be too expensive. These are the two I keep recommending to people.
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-cpu-cooler-rr212e20pkr2
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/noctua-cpu-cooler-nhd14

I already have the Hyper 212 EVO, and it's doing great but a bit weird too :
When booting, the BIOS reads ~40°C all the time. When entering an OS, should it be Windows or Linux, the temperature drops to 28-33°C. When stress-testing the CPU while it was @ stock 3.40 Ghz, I would get 60-65 °C as max temp. When the test was over, it was getting back to ~30 °C within 5 secs. Since I overclocked (the only thing I did was raising the turbo mode multiplier to 42, I touched nothing else. I saw things about DRAM and voltage but I'm too unsure to touch it), the idle temps are almost the same, but maximum temp I observed was 70 °C which I believe to be not bad at all.
I'm using a push-pull config, cooler-fan pushes air through heat-sink and that is being pulled out by case rear fan :
OUTSIDE <--CASEFAN--| ~~ -HEATSINK- ~~ <--CPUFAN--| .

I don't know if this will allow me to overclock further.