Hello, how's everyone doing? I'm a novice Dolphin user, having downloaded it only several days ago, and this is my first post, so I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the developers for making Dolphin available to the public, and continuously supporting it throughout the years. Thank you!
That being said, I've been trying to solve an issue I've encountered when running Sonic Colors NTSC on Dolphin 3.0 64-bit, as well as on other, newer revisions. You see, while on DirectX mode, and no matter what the resolution settings are, Sonic Colors always runs at the lowest possible resolution. The videos and other "2D images" on screen, such as the HUD, seem to be upscaled to 1080p, however the game itself is stuck on native resolution. OpenGL solves the resolution problem, but creates other minor issues, and as all other games I've tried so far run absolutely flawlessly on DirectX 9, I'd very much like to keep it that way. By the way, I'm running Dolphin on my brand new, i7 3770k/GTX 690 rig, on Windows 7 64-Bit, if that matters at all.
Has anyone here encountered this problem so far? Thank you for your input!
Scaled efb copy might help if it isn't on.
Thanks, I've tried enabling "Scaled EFB Copy" before but it didn't really help. In fact, it actually caused some odd, straight lines to appear around, and across Sonic himself. At this point I'm thinking it's probably got something to do with my video card drivers, so I'll probably have to wait until the next release.
Do you use EFB Copies to RAM? If so, tick the "Enable Cache" option.
Thanks again, guys. I haven't found a solution yet, but I'll post it here as soon as I do. Now, starting another topic seems to be a waste, so I'll just ask it here...
My 3770k/GTX 690 combo does a pretty good job at running most games at full speed @ 1920x1080/2x native res/4x SSAA*/4AF* on Dolphin 3.0 64-Bit, which is the official release I suppose. Even F-Zero GX runs extremely well, at a constant 60fps, except for the Sand Ocean track where it slows down to about 35fps inside the tunnel/pyramid. The latest revision, #3.0-716-dirty, on the other hand, runs much, much slower. F-Zero GX becomes unplayable on it, even on considerably lower settings. Is there a reason for that, as in "non-official releases are poorly optimized"?
* Interestingly enough, disabling SAAA altogether, and setting AF to 1X makes it run slower.
The new Dolphin revisions after Dolphin 3.0 seem to be slower, because they emulate games more accurately. Therefore, there should be less graphical issues, random crashes and so on.
Besides, this versions are not official releases
The official release, and #3.0-716-dirty are definitely doing something different. While CPU utilization on the first peaks at ~29%, it only ever reaches ~13% on the latter, so it's looks like an optimization issue to me. To tell you the truth, having heard that Dolphin could only use 2 cores, I assumed it fully utilized 2 of the cores, but apparently that's not the case even on the official release. By the way, I'm not complaining, or criticizing even, it's just that looking at CPU utilization/temperatures while running Dolphin has been sort of an eye-opener for me.
I've been running a few tests with Dolphin, at different settings, and different resolutions and this is what I've observed so far on Sonic Colors and F-Zero GX (the most demanding game I've encountered so far):
- As I mentioned before, disabling Anti-Aliasing, and Anisotropic Filtering actually hurts performance in my setup.
- Rendering @ 1X native, 2X, 3X or AUTO @ 1080p makes absolutely no difference (still get the same exact fps dips in the same exact spots) on the aforementioned games, except for the CPU usage that does change depending on the resolution, with 1X hovering @ around 17%, 2X @ 29%, 3X 37%, and 1080p @ 33%. So, I'm inclined to agree with my wife when she says that it's not like the hardware is struggling, it's just that those 2 games apparently "can't be run any faster" on Dolphin 3.0 64-Bit at the moment.
- Locking frames to 60fps helps performance, and causes less audio hiccups.
- Locking threads to cores hurts performance by a few fps.
- DSP LLE on thread helps performance by a few fps.
I can say that my experience with Dolphin these past few days has been fun and rewarding, and I'm loving it!
I am quite sure you are hitting the nvidia GTX 6XX bug. For some reason, Dolphin is not putting enough stress on your monster GPU and the GPU does not kick out of sleep mode. Sleep mode is the cause of the low framerates you are getting. This is likely to be a nvidia driver bug which they should resolve soon.
The other case I have seen is Windows putting the CPU into a low power mode. Not sure if this is the case, but you can check by changing the power options in Windows to high performance.
Thanks skid, I appreciate the input. I believe you're absolutely right, and if fan speed is any indication... well, let's just say that I cannot hear my GPU fan at all when I'm running Dolphin. 3DMark11, on the other hand, makes it obvious that the fan is spinning for its life. Here's hoping for a new and improved Nvidia driver soon! By the way, I thought I read somewhere that GPUs didn't matter much with Dolphin, because graphics were mostly rendered by the CPU?