Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

About the game (IGN.com)
Metroid Prime is an action-packed adventure set in the first-person perspective that takes place just after the events in the original Metroid (NES). It has lead character Samus Aran, a bounty hunter by trade, chasing down the evil Space Pirates. Their intention is to use a genetic mutagen called Phazon to create a super army and take over the universe. While the installments in the series before have never been home to deeply involving storylines, Metroid Prime breaks the shell to offer up one of the most intriguing and read-worthy sagas yet. Developed by Texas-based Retro Studios. Metroid Prime brings all of the elements of the acclaimed franchise into a gaping 3D arena.

Emulation Status & Speed

Issues:
• None.
  
  Emulation Speed
• The game requires incredible CPU-Speed because of it's awesome graphics
  

Additional Information
The game is fully supported and playable, but requires a very (!) good CPU. You will have to turn "Use safe texture cache" on to play it, if you don't Dolphin will crash at several places.

Screenshots

What is your average FPS

Around 20-100 on e8400 3.6 ghz, and massive fps drop on opening doors, sometimes its too fast or slow, IL and turned off the third option in DPS helps a lot.

by the requirment is written at least 2ghz and dual core for speed boost.
I have a Quadcore 2,33ghz so i´t use with dual core function 4,66ghz but metroid runs in slow motion 15-25fps

I wouldn't call it perfect... I guess if you compare them to some other games it could be considered perfect...

I still get MASSIVE frame drops in any big room, or looking at LAVA. Not only that, it seems to have problems with stable frame rates... frame rates seem to vary a LOT in the same scene from time to time. There needs to be some kind of stabilization for this... I think this is a problem in all games though... just needs more core optimization.

Also when you jump into or out of water, you get the splash on the visor or the water running off the visor, and that seems to lag the game a lot as well.

I still also get random crashes, which most of the time it's switching visors and morphing, where the screen like "flashes" (a lot of memory pointer errors happen during this time, thank god for the change to suppress these!)

Then there's still some texture corruption in certain places, most notably in PD when you're on your way to the gravity suit, the walls sometimes have a black textured background with like orange-ish markings. I think they should be some kind of rock like texture.

Dunno, just a few things I've noticed when playing. I would say speed is the number one issue, the game kinda sucks when you're trying to do some of the "sequence breaking" techniques and the game changes speed so quickly sometimes, it's hard to time some things to get it right. Second is the switching between visors and morphing... lag... Texture corruption is minimal, and crashes don't happen all THAT often, I just save a lot =)

EDIT: Oh and for those who would say my computer is lacking... here's my specs:

Core i7 920 @2.9Ghz
3GB Corsair DOMINATOR DDR3 Triple Channel @ 1600MHz (8-8-8-24)
GeForce GTX 260 (216 Core, 55nm die)
2 x 250GB Sata2 7200RPM Seagate HDD's RAID-0 stripe

My computer is far from slow =)

(03-25-2009, 04:50 AM)SSJVeggeto Wrote: [ -> ]by the requirment is written at least 2ghz and dual core for speed boost.
I have a Quadcore 2,33ghz so i´t use with dual core function 4,66ghz but metroid runs in slow motion 15-25fps

Using multiple cores does not increase the GHz that the CPU runs at, a quad core 3GHz does not = 12GHz, it's still 3GHz, it just has more processing cores to hand out tasks to. So unless you're manually overclocking your CPU to 4.66GHz, which would take some serious water cooling and other fancy stuff, you're only running at 2.33GHz no matter how many cores you are using.

And besides all that... GHz means next to nothing these days. The i7 920 quad core only runs at 2.6 GHz and it blows away almost all other 3.0+ GHz CPU's of earlier models, by a long shot.

Well said Unknownforce, but what frames are you getting with that i7@2.9 of yours?

(03-25-2009, 06:00 AM)fagoatse Wrote: [ -> ]Well said Unknownforce, but what frames are you getting with that i7@2.9 of yours?

Like I said, it varies, sometimes I can get full 60fps (I play NTSC(US)) othertimes, like at the beginning of Chozo Ruins, when like where the cutscene intro kicks off, frames drop to like 10-15, even lower, very bad.

In Magmoor Caverns it's bad too, like in the big open room with the Green poison blobs when you climb up on way to Phendrana drifts, it's got the underground passage for the missile expansion and the missile expansion in the middle. That room is kinda bad. The room with the 3 lava pits and the energy tank you get when you scan to freeze the lava so you can roll in morph to it, that room is pretty bad. low 20's in those 2 rooms.

I know it already exist a 3d about Metroid Prime, is by Kraid, and is a garbage thread.

This is a complete Metroid Test, through different PC specs.

Best Build: Get the latest Jit. (Don't use JitIL as someone wrongly adviced)

Best Version: PAL, in 60hz mode.

Settings:
-General> All ON
-Video Plugin> Default + Enable Safe Texture Cache
Anti Aliasing: See Notes.
-DSP> All on. Dsound.

OS used: Windows XP 32bit - Windows XP 64bit.

Test:
This isn't a Perfect Emulation
I tried this game on 3 different PC.
Intel e5200+Ge-Force 8600GT.
Intel e8500+ Ge-Force 9600GT.
Intel i720+ Ge-Force 9800GT. (This one running on Vista64)

The best system to run Metroid it was Intel e8500. No doubt on it.
With the e8500 the framerate was the better in this test.
Intel i720 showed almost the same performances of my e5200 overclocked. A little better, of course, but really nothing special.

The game biggest issue is about the frame rate.
On 8500 it goes from 22 to 73 fps, with audio throttle enabled.
The problem is this happens almost always while playing.
And, if the game is playable when it runs at 30 frames... it's really unplayable when it's less than 30 and more than 50fps.
Big lacks of speed when you open a door, in big areas, and sometimes while shiftin' weapons.

The sound: Stable if you set the emulator before running the game. And you don't use Dolphin IL, since this version can make some sound's troubles.

The game can be completed (PAL version dumped from original)

Notes:
About Anti-Aliasing. If you enable it you'll have serious issues about speed. On 8500 the framerate was almost good, 26fps.
But on others i haved very bad results: A minimum of 10fps on e5200, and a maximum of 20fps on i720.

Conclusions: Maybe better wait to play Metroid Prime.

New Problem in the Latest builds (Between any builds after 2865 up to 2977 so far). Something changed with the Map. When you view your map, there are lines that draw the each room and then each side is shaded. For some reason on the latest builds the lines are thicker, more bold than they are supposed to be and it causes a huge hit on the FPS.

Has anyone had issues saving games on a PC? Metroid can't find my memory card files for some reason.