Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Please correct my terms or ignorance if need be, but I've seen something strange. Fatal Frame IV. It has d11 rendering problems in current versions, d9 has no true AA for my computer, and 32bit versions (trying out fxaa) have mostly the same rendering problems, but it looks like 3.0 32bit with fxaa is fine.

Anyway, my point is that I've tried like 7 different revisions and altering 32bit/64bit of some of them. Every single time I start this game, I can run immediately right into a small hallway and a cutscene hits. That cutscene stutters a bit from my 30fps. I go forward, my character gets stopped and a tutorial message gets brought up, stutters again. These are both pretty hefty and very noticeable. If I escape out of the game, load it up again, and go right back through this area, it stays locked at 30fps. I even tried this on my main revision where I went 30 minutes into the game days ago but have spent several hours on 2 other games since then. It went through those two instances just fine, no stutters, though it did have problems the first time as well.

Is this an actual small bit of something the emulator is saving in a file or what? I am totally ignorant of how this works overall but it's not just coincidence that every single version I try will play sections it already has absolutely fine yet struggle with the cuts and messages in new areas. Is this something that could be transferred? Like one person who has already beat the game could get this "cache" or whatever to everyone else as a download?

Any thoughts?

Good idea? I'm stupid and I don't understand how this works? Maybe a possibility?

If anything I'm just wondering how dolphin is able to replay sections perfectly that it had trouble loading before and where something like that might be stored.

Sounds like the shader cache. Things may run a bit slower the first time around until the pixel shader and vertex shader cache get recognized and written to user/shader cache. At least that's what it sounds like you're describing. Once you run through that area again it has all the information stored and runs faster.

Is it possible to distribute that though?

I've almost never experience such framerate drops the first time and such great stability the second time through, but I imagine there are probably other games like this in that respect.

I think so, as long as the same video backend was used, same game region and probably the same revision number (or close to the same build so that no major changes were made).

All right, asked in the fatal frame if anyone has these files that has completed the game. It does look like they just slowly add size since they're a lot larger in the revision I've gone farther in. Since these are all made by the emulator, it doesn't have protection like playstation bios or a dsp dump right?

Maybe not worth it to try and make a library of tons of games over multiple revisions but this game ran so much better that for a few specific cases it might be nice to be able to download the cache and get a smooth playthrough rather than waiting for your second run in the game.