Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

This is interesting, Xtreme2damax.

That said, omegadox's guess is probably right. The game (not dolphin) might load and cache the vertices once you have revealed the greater field. This would cause dolphin to perform more processing and therefore slow it down. A telling clue would be to have a similar slowdown on the real hardware.

To definitely know the cause of the slowdown, we would need to use a profiler. Do you know how to operate a profiler? The basic instruction is:

1. Play dolphin up to the just before entering Twilight Hyrule Field where it will still be 30fps.
2. Perform a savestate and exit dolphin
3. Start the profiler
4. Start dolphin from within the profiler and load the savestate
5. Record what it is doing at 30fps using the profiler.
6. Exit dolphin and the profiler
7. Start dolphin only, and load the savestate and play the game so that you jump over the gate etc until the bit just before the game hits 10-15fps.
8. Make a save state
9. Start the profiler and dolphin from within the profiler
10. Load the new savestate
11. Using the profiler record what happens when the game is running at 10-15fps.
12. Copy and paste both the old and new results from the profiler for us so we can identify the cause of the slowdown. From there, we might be able to optimise dolphin to minimise the effect of the slowdown.

Is the profiler the debugger, once I know how I can start the profiler I can do as you asked. I'm interested to know more about it since it is a bit confusing to me.

Take a look at Intel VTune Performance Analyzer. It is a profiler.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-vtune/

Thanks I will have to download and test later using the evaluation version of Vtune since the file size is too large for me to download right now.

If anyone with a better connection or anyone who already has the Vtune software feels up to this, feel free to do what skid mentioned as it could be a bit before I can get around to it.

I didn't realize the file size of the Vtune performance analyzer was so large (340 MB), so I will be unable to download until after midnight Eastern Standard Time.

There might be other profilers you can try. The one I know about is VTune.

(02-25-2010, 09:21 AM)omegadox Wrote: [ -> ]This is because Hyrule is largely complex in the map, many vertices and textures to decode, its doing a lot of processing. You go into a town and the program "deloads" the highly mass field.

But snowpeak for example, is also a quite massive area and it stays at 29-30fps all the time. Also every single other area in the game regardless of size, plays just fine at full fps.

The thing that makes it even stranger, is the fact that Hyrule field works at full FPS until you finish Goron mines. It doesn't become any bigger right after that, as it's quite in the beginning of the game, nor are any new map objects added, so it must be some event in the game inducing the bug.

I'd also like to mention that Gerudo Mesa is about the same in size and runs full speed as well, it seems to be a unique case with Hyrule Field. I enabled wireframe mode and I could see anything that would result in such massive slowdowns, not many more vertices being rendered in Hyrule Field than the rest of the game.

I will get around to testing with the profiler later and post the results, perhaps if this was fixed other games that exhibit slowdowns could benefit as well.

Well I'm trying to test with the Vtune profiling software, I can only keep Dolphin open for a few seconds before the profiling software suddenly terminates the Dolphin process.

Does anyone know of a better (completely free) profiling software?

I haven't followed this problem, but can you load a save from a real console, after you've passed the point where the problem begins ?

If it works fine, then we can determine that it's something that breaks at a specific point.

Well the game does work fine on the actual hardware, Hyrule Field only has major slowdowns in Dolphin. I am trying to do what skid mentioned but for some reason the Intel Vtune software keeps terminating the Dolphin process after a few seconds and I'm not sure why. It's also asking for a symbol files which it obviously can't find, so I click skip every time.