Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(07-24-2011, 04:58 PM)StepDragon Wrote: [ -> ]3 SSDs in RAID-0 primary drive
2 1.5TB HDD for storage. (5700 RPM, but high density (3x500GB discs), on par with normal 7200 drives)

Dolphin and the iso are on one of the storage drives. I don't have much room on the raid array, are you thinking moving everything would help, or are tehre specific directories / files which would benefit (such as a cache folder, or just the iso itself)... I'm not sure how much a hard drive will affect it since I can copy my entire ISO from one of my storage drives to another (or to itself even) in only a few seconds. (just tested, got a 100MB/s transfer rate... I could try a ram disk if you think it will help.

That's the thing. You'll have to find out if one of your HDDs is failing. You need to leave at least 20% free space (especially for the primary drive) regardless of the type of disk drive you have.

Experiment with those and see if that helps.

(07-24-2011, 06:07 PM)gaiachaos Wrote: [ -> ]That's the thing. You'll have to find out if one of your HDDs is failing. You need to leave at least 20% free space (especially for the primary drive) regardless of the type of disk drive you have.

Experiment with those and see if that helps.

"You need to leave at least 20% free space (especially for the primary drive) regardless of the type of disk drive you have."
I don't understand this statement. even if a disc would have better performance with empty space (possibly due to limiting of fragmentation), why would that have anything to do with a percentage of a drive's space? If a file is only a GB large, and you're opening it from two different drives (lets say a 100GB vs a 2TB) why would leaving 20GB free on the 100GB drive be the same (performance impact) as leaving 400GB free on the 2TB drive? where as leaving 20GB of free space would be (according to your logic) more crippling the 2TB drive than the 100GB drive... I just don't understand what would make you say that (intended that way or not)

I'm confused because I don't even understand WHY you're saying what you're saying. its not that I don't know how it works, but I don't even know what you're trying to achieve with it.

As for the - "You'll have to find out if one of your HDDs is failing."
All my hard drives (and SSDs) are less than a year old, and have been thoroughly tested.

If free space matters, the RAID array is (raid0) 3x16GB with 6GB free, the Games 1.5TB drive has 1TB free, and the Storage 1.5TB drive has 810GB free.


also...

eljuggy Wrote:Do you have the slowdowns with a fresh install of dolphin + standard iso without any HR texture ?

Just tested on r7608 (I have a few more revisions on my computer, but I had stopped upping when I heard that texture loading was broken in newer versions... 7671 for example I tested but it didn't work, anyways, that has nothing to do with my problem so i'm going to continue now)

results from r7608: same settings as my other revision (as far as I could remember to tick) no texture loading, freshly configured. stutters as described above, but more often and for less duration.. so for example, instead of stuttering twice during the opening cinema and lagging for 1/4 a second, it stuttered like 6 times but only for 1/8 or less of a second each time... just enough to make it noticable.


EDIT: This is wierd. I can't get it to happen again in 7530. It happens when texture loading is on, but not when its off (which makes perfect sense) I'm just confused because I had tested all of this before and it had made no difference. I would like to test this by loading the textures onto a ramdisk (super fast loading), but does anyone know how to change the dolphin default texture loading directory? or would I have to move the entire folder structure to the ramdisk?

Anyways, If I can get this lag figured out (by that I mean fixed, even with texture loading enabled, even if it costs an arm and a leg) then I'll get some updated videos up for my texture project. I'm going to try moving the folder structure to the ramdisk. If anyone can figure out remapping the folder structure, that would be awesome.

Also, sorry about the futile quest. Sometimes there are just ghosts in the machines (and if you say otherwise, then you either write your own binary code, or haven't been working with computers long enough)

EDIT: ok, now I'm really confused. given the information from the previous edit, I would have assumed running from a ramdisk would solve the problems (assuming the lag is from texture loading taking too long, creating a stutter)

I made a 4GB ramdisk, moved the ISO, dolphin, and the entire folder structure (including high rez textures) to it and I'm STILL getting the lag... I can only assume that this is some kind of an error with the texture loading engine (maybe this has something to do with it being broken in the newer versions... as they 'fix' it)

I just don't know anymore.

Quote:All my hard drives (and SSDs) are less than a year old, and have been thoroughly tested.

Just to kind of note, life times of SSD's are very long, TRIM support helps out a little bit though. Not uncommon to hear an SSD going bad after a year. Just ask Intel about that one.

My point is your setup is very incompatible. So if you are running an OS on SSD while gaming on HDD, you'll encounter conflicts. You are better off using one or the other, but not both.

Quick fix won't do. You will just be putting a band-aid on the problem.

EDIT: Use your HDDs for storage only because your OS is installed in SSD!!!!

You haven't offered an explanation for your statement. saying my system "isn't very compatible" is like saying that nvidia and ati cards aren't very compatible. sure, they're not, but with the right drivers and configuration, you can run an Eyefinity game with physX.

Plenty of high end gamers will combine SSDs and HDDs for performance benefits, even running the executables off of a HDD you can still get performance increase by running your system or even your cache off of the SSD. Sure an incompatibility such as cache size or seek time may make a difference but that's like saying your air conditioning in your sports car is going to affect your torque. its just noise in the data. I would expect more interference from the fact that I'm running a raid array (motherboard) than the drives I'm using.

your reply was even after I posted the results of testing on a ramdisk, which (having just tested) a minimum of 2242.6MB/s transfer rate, with a 0.0ms response and 2916.6 MB/s burst rate. If that didn't make a difference in the performance, I don't see the disc drives being the problem.

for a site that deals with a program that basically requires enthusiast level hardware, I don't know why I have to explain some of this.

I'm done worrying about this, I'll chalk it up to being a flaw in the texture loader (its an old revision, don't get mad at me) which is already being worked on (because texture loading is completely broken in current revs (last I checked a week ago) meaning its in progress)

Hope that works for all of you. I'm just tired of nothing I've attempted making any difference whatsoever.

So in the end you're using an old revision which could very well be the source of your problem.

(07-25-2011, 03:49 PM)vortextk Wrote: [ -> ]So in the end you're using an old revision which could very well be the source of your problem.

Yes which was stated in the original post (does anyone here read?), and was noted because the feature was completely broken in newer revisions. many people use older revisions becuase of compatibility / driver / configuration problems game dependant. Given the fact that the problem persisted between older and newer revisions (7530 and 7608, I'm not going to test every newer build to see when the cut off point was) its either 1. a config problem, because I configure them the same. 2. a hardware problem, which has been mentioned, but never proved. 3. an underlying problem with the emulator, which cannot be proved as texture loading is currently broken in newer builds. I also have yet to see anyone else with this problem.

anyone know if the newest builds have fixed texture loading yet? I'm gonna go check.

EDIT: Just tested on r7683. Texture dumping and loading is still broken. I'm stuck with older revisions. If any other possible explanations come up, please let me know.