Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

This NTSC GC game is fully playable at fullspeed on both of the computers in my sig, but there are two rooms that produce really low fps when entered.

1) The first room that has major slowdown is on the first floor around the corner from one of the item boxes and is the room where the broken shotgun is located and is also where one of the karosene containers is inside the mansion. When you move over to the desk (where the ink ribbon is), the game slows down dramatically to 1 fps.

2) The other room that is extremly slow is the room where the dog whistle is located. This room has two doors that both lead to it. One of the doors is by the stairway where the giant chandelier is, the other door is next to where you find the wooden mount. Once you enter this room the fps also drops down to 1 fps.

I have gotten through the entire game and I get 90-100% speed throughout except for these two rooms where something is causing major slowdowns.

I've tested with Dolphin SVN R6200 32-bit and many newer and older builds with the same results. Obviously there is someting majorly wrong here since the entire game plays normally until you get to these two rooms where there is no logical reason to expect the fps to drop down to a crawl at 1 fps when the rest of the game plays nearly flawlessly. Maybe someone can look into this to see what might be going on here.

My most recent tests were with this PC:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition, 32-bit, SP3
CPU: Single-Core AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2.4 GHz
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 3650, 1GB DDR2
RAM: 1GB DDR

DirectX9
Enable Safe Texture Cache - Fast
SSAA - 9X
EFB Scale - 1X
EFB Scaled Copy - Enabled
EFB Copy To Texture

Single Core
JIT
Enable Idle Skipping
Enable OpenCL
Framelimit - Off
Frameskipping - 1
Use Panic Handlers
Resolution - 1280X1024

Well you're specifications are mostly to blame for slowdowns. I can run the game at full speed constantly on my Core2duo E8500 and new PC with a Core i7.

It is not possible that my computer is not fast enough when 99% of the game plays normally. I guess your computer finds a way to power though those two rooms and causes no slowdown at all? Have you tried it without dual core enabled? I'm curious to find out if anyone else is seeing the same results as I am or if this somehow is only related to my PC. I guess I need single core users to test this or dual core users testing using only one core.

Either way, there is no way any game would go down to 1 fps at any point unless something was wrong.

1 fps is oddly low, sounds like it's either an issue with your hardware or the build you are using. If you are using the optimized builds of mine or Lectrodes there is an issue with ICC and the OGL plugin that causes games to run at 1 FPS. Other than that I don't know, my FPS wasn't event that bad on an old AMD64 x2 3800+ system I used to own so it sounds like something is wrong on your end.

I'd like skid or some other devs to maybe look in at this and see if they can explain what might be going on here if possible.

Are you sure you didn't accidentally switch on the interpreter or are using insanely high settings?

There is no reason it should be running that slow, even my old AMD64 X 2 3800+ at stock could get a constant 20 FPS - 25 FPS with some minor dips on older builds. Something definitely sounds wrong, but I don't think it's the game or Dolphin, considering myself and others are able to run it just fine. Have you tried a different build yet to see if that is the problem?

I found the problem. I had dual-core enabled on my single-core PC. It is funny though, all of the rest of the game was running fine at normal speed throughout with dual-core enabled until I hit these two rooms. Disabling dual-core made those two rooms regain their normal fps.

Glad you resolved your problem, weird though.

Using dual-core on a single-core PC did offer a slight speed boost believe it or not in a few games I've noticed, that is why I did enable that option in that game's properties at some point. I realize it was not designed to be used in that way, but it does seem to point to a bug in the dual-core option somewhere.

(09-22-2010, 08:41 AM)[SS] Starscream Wrote: [ -> ]but it does seem to point to a bug in the dual-core option somewhere.

The "bug" is in the video thread - it does not release the PC's core when the Wii's GPU is idle. It does a busy-wait. It's not really a bug as the alternative will slow Dolphin down for everybody - dual core PC's or not.

We have an issue about it - issue 2926.