Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Jovianpat: His CPU is inferior to yours and his GPU is superior. Why are you telling him what works for you? It's like the apple telling an orange how to become red. Also, you completely ignored his system issue. Oye.

Bonniebear Wrote:I'm having a strange issue. *snip*

This definitely sounds like a system issue. Let's check the obvious things.

1. Why did you have to do a full system restore? It could be that whatever caused that issue is still going on.
2. Make sure your CPU is running at the clockspeed it should have. If your system went unstable it may have underclocked and just left it until you reset the speed back to stock. Some motherboards are like that.
3. Use a program like RealTemp to find the temperature of your CPU under load. You can use prime95 to really stress it and see how high it goes and if there are any stability problems. Be sure to record how high it goes during the tests and post them here.
4. Yes check for viruses. Especially bizzare CPU and GPU usage. If your computer is slaved to a bitmining botnet your performance is going to tank.
5. You may have a graphics driver issue. Uninstalling and reinstalling your graphics drivers wouldn't be a bad idea. An update shouldn't hurt either.
6. Try other programs and games, see if anything else is adversely affected.

Bonniebear Wrote:CPU: AMD Athlon X4 760K 3.8GHz

Now, as for general speed advance - Your CPU sucks. So with that in mind, you are getting nearly fullspeed, so let's try this. First of all, upgrade from 4.0.2 to the latest dev version. Your CPU is crap but your GPU is pretty good, and the current dev builds are lighter on the CPU end and heavier on the GPU end, so they will be better for your system than 4.0.2. Just remember that the GPU thread limitations though so make sure you start at 1x native and go up.

Considering how slow your CPU is, I'll give you the dumb things that improve performance at the expense of graphics quality. Skip EFB Access to CPU will cut out the sand ocean effect and various other intensive effects, and should give you more of a boost. If you are desperate, turn off everything secondary that might possibly affect a performance hit, AA, AF, Per-Pixel Lighting, etc. You could try OpenMP but that probably will do nothing.

There are random reset problems with this game. Just don't use syncGPU. Ever. It's slower than single core in most circumstances, and monumentally slower than Dual Core. Your system desperately needs that speed. While resets are rare in dual core, they can happen. The resets are generally predictable and not bad, especially since Dolphin is more reliable now, so you should be able to play the game fine in Dual Core. Just keep the problem in mind.


And finally, upgrade your CPU man. You really need it. Get a good Haswell chip or something.

Honestly I don't know much about AMD CPUs though. Sorry about that
Btw, what's the best backend for this game? Currently I'm using OpenGL, because the wiki says that it's the most compatible for NVidia GPUs.

Well, after playing around with it some more, I was able to get it to a point where, while not perfect, its now preforming better than it was before.

The major issue was the Synchronize GPU thread setting. I was keeping it on since the instructions in the preferences said it was necessary to run the game... for some reason. Anyway, that alone improve the game by 100%

Other things I did to improve it (mainly from MaJoR's advice)

- Updated my chipset drivers (kind of got lazy about that, my GPU drivers were all up to date)
- Turned on Skip EFB Access from CPU
- Turned off other preferences like VBeam Speed Hack and MMU Speed Hack (which seems to turn the game into the Benny Hill show)
- Updated Dolphin to the developer version as MaJoR said. The overall performance isn't necessarily better, but it is much smoother and the sound clipping is a lot less obvious. I'll usually get 45-55 FPS, occasionally a solid 60, but its at least a more consistent frame rate and its a lot more playable.
- Switched to OpenGL from DX11, the game actually works the best on DX9, but that doesn't seem to be an option in the developer version.

Seems to run just as with auto up-scaled resolution and 4xAA

Other than that I guess the only thing to do if I wished to improve it is get a new CPU (its not exactly in budget)

(06-19-2014, 09:43 PM)MaJoR Wrote: [ -> ]Jovianpat: His CPU is inferior to yours and his GPU is superior. Why are you telling him what works for you? It's like the apple telling an orange how to become red. Also, you completely ignored his system issue. Oye.

Maybe I'm completely ignorant about CPU's (probably) but could you please explain how JovianPat Duel core CPU clocked at 1.7-2.7 GHz is superior to a Quad core cpu clocked at 3.8 GHz? I'm aware I don't have the best CPU in the world and performance varies with different chipsets, but so far, F Zero is the only thing that seems to be giving me trouble. This includes other games in Dolphin as well as a few near top of the line PC games (Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs)

Yeah, his dualcore at 2.7 GHz is better than your Quadcore at 3.8GHz. That's how bad AMD CPUs are.

Okay, but how? I know this is getting off topic, so maybe you can link me to somewhere or give me a simple down version, but I'd like to know so I know what to look for in the future when shopping for a new CPU/Computer.

Apart from his i5 being more energy efficient and arguably a better value overall (unless thats what you meant), this seems to state otherwise: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3317U-vs-AMD-Athlon-X4-760K

Oh, his IPC is much higher than yours, but not haswell higher. You have much more Cycles though, so, it ends up evening out.

A dualcore Haswell processor at 2.6 GHz would outperform your 3.8GHz AMD by about 25% in Dolphin though. I wish I could explain, but, you want higher IPC, and you want that high IPC paired with a high clockrate. You have relatively low (but definitely not as bad as some of the bulldozer processors I've seen) IPC compared to his i5. At 2.7GHz, he's very, very close to your processor in performance, even on that chart.

It's also possible that it supports extensions that your processor doesn't, allowing faster codepaths to be used in Dolphin. I really don't know, but you've proven your point that your processor shouldn't be slower.

Actually, even with my CPU the game still has some lags at random point, usually in the intro. I'll try changing my settings later.

I was going through Lightning - Half Pipe, and my game crashed & threw up this error:

Negative fifo.CPReadWriteDistance = -26016 in FIFO Loop !
That can produce instability in the game. Please report it.

So, here I am. What happened?

EDIT: Was doing Red Rock Canyon and got 2 more errors. Oh boy. I didn't manage to screencap them, but I think I've found someone else who got the same errors before. Below is what they got, and while I can't say that their numbers were the same as mine, it's the same gist. If it happens again, I'll screencap it.

GFX FIFO: Unknown OpCode (0x5)
This means one of the following:
*The emulated GPU got desynced, disabling dual core can help
*Commands stream corrupted by some spurious memory bug
*This really is unknown opcode(unlikely)
*Some other sort of bug

Dolphin will now likley crash or hang. Enjoy.

2nd error code is

Illegal command 05
CPbase:0x0054d920
CPEnd:0x005ad900
CPhiWatermakr:0x0005c00
CPLoWatermark:0x00050000
CPReadWriteDistance:0x0000080
CPWritePointer:0x0054d9a0
CPReadPointer: 0x0054d920
CP Breakpoint:0x00554ee0
bFF_GPReadenable: true
bFF_BPEnable:false
bFF_GPlinkEnable: false
bFF_breakpoint : true

Yeah, it can happen in dualcore. That's just how the game is. If you want to guarantee absolutely no crashes, use single core or the sync gpu option in Dolphin's Game Properties section.

Just wanted to add, that I was able to achieve 60 FPS with decent sound on my AMD 8350 setup. Video of this can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPwnSI29xRI

Attached files show what settings I used to achieve this.

P.S. The stuttering you see in the video was caused by HyperCam's software and not game play. The game was absolutely fluid when I was playing it. It just came out a tad choppy in the video recording. Also, I was actually able to achieve around 80 FPS, however, for the purposes of the video, I put an FPS cap of 60 on in the settings. If I remember correctly, I peaked at over 100 FPS a few times with it off.
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