Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey all! Bit new to the forum and not overly experienced with Dolphin, so I apologize in advance if any issues I have are very basic or have been otherwise answered before countless times.

I'm currently trying to use the latest dev version of Dolphin (4.0-5103) and am also trying to use the HD Textures. However, when the title screen is allowed to sit, the FPS and audio both tank (the audio has a non-stop crackle) at the bit where the sun begins to set. Before that exact moment, everything is fine. I've also noticed similar issues within the opening cutscenes (the crackle isn't nonstop but happens quite often). Messing with the resolution/AA and switching between HLE and LLE does nothing to alleviate the issue.

What's interesting about this and makes me feel it must be something stupidly simple is that I also have and decided to try the stable version of the emulator, and while I still have the very occasional audio stutter (which I do know is normal thanks to the wiki page), I don't have any of the other issues. I've tried looking through the options to compare and they seem to match up, but obviously some options don't exist that used to,or vice versa, and I may be missing something either way.

Obviously I could just stick with the stable version, and that'd be fine if I can't figure this out, but on the off chance the game would run even better (perhaps even getting rid of the slight audio glitch) it'd be nice to use the later version.

Thanks in advance for any help, and I do again apologize if this is a bit of an annoying question.

Edit -

Alright, now I'm even more confused. The only thing I can think of that I did is take out the textures (which I put back shortly after), and now the stable version is having the same issue. Tanks the second the sun starts setting and for the first bits whereas before it worked beautifully. Gah!

More Edit -

Been messing with it a bit more, and it seems setting EFB Copies to Texture is helping if not getting rid of the issue on both the stable and dev versions. Still getting some audio skip here and there (using LLE) but it's minor. What's odd about this is I'm pretty damn sure that the stable version was running perfectly with EFB set to Ram + Enable Cache, so I'm still at a loss as to what happened there. So very confusing. @_@

As soon as your computer (it would help to know your specs) can't maintain fullspeed in the game, the sound gets bad. EFBtoRAM is a very taxing setting, so having it enabled probably kills your performance. The only thing that EFBtoRAM is needed for in this game are the screenshots of the save files. If you can live without those, just switch to EFBtoTexture.

Apologies, it was late and my brain was reeling trying to figure out what I had done to mess up what had already been working fine. I did put my build in my profile, but I'm guessing that's not enough?

Either way, I fiddled with it a little more and ran some more tests, and the game seems  to at least run through the intro bits (up til you get Shulk) perfectly on the dev version, not even any minor sound issues as the stable version seemed to still have. Hopefully that'll keep up and I'll be just fine to get through the game!

Thanks for the response, and sorry again for the lack of info.

No problem, I always forget people put their specs in their profile.

Yeah, your PC is more than enough, even my old computer can run the game at fullspeed (though I used the Ishiiruka build, but that was half a year ago and the master build got a loooot of performance optimizations since then).

Hello I'm new to these forums so sorry if this question/problem had been solved already, but I've been searching around everywhere. Currently I'm using the most updated dolphin version and playing xenoblade but occasionally have audio crackles. From the post above I already set EFBtoTexture, but that didn't fix the problem (specs are in my profile)

(01-17-2015, 03:33 AM)Wiral Wrote: [ -> ]Hello I'm new to these forums so sorry if this question/problem had been solved already, but I've been searching around everywhere. Currently I'm using the most updated dolphin version and playing xenoblade but occasionally have audio crackles. From the post above I already set EFBtoTexture, but that didn't fix the problem (specs are in my profile)

Are you running Dolphin at fullspeed? Run Dolphin in windowed mode and look at the %. If it's not 100%, you'll probably encounter audio issues. There are various remedies for this, but first tell us if Dolphin's speed is the issue.

(01-17-2015, 03:48 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]

(01-17-2015, 03:33 AM)Wiral Wrote: [ -> ]Hello I'm new to these forums so sorry if this question/problem had been solved already, but I've been searching around everywhere. Currently I'm using the most updated dolphin version and playing xenoblade but occasionally have audio crackles. From the post above I already set EFBtoTexture, but that didn't fix the problem (specs are in my profile)

Are you running Dolphin at fullspeed? Run Dolphin in windowed mode and look at the %. If it's not 100%, you'll probably encounter audio issues. There are various remedies for this, but first tell us if Dolphin's speed is the issue.

It seems that I'm not running at 100%. It stays 100%, but lowers randomly then goes back to 100%

Edit: It seems the game isn't a stable 30 fps either, which is also a problem. it stays between 20-30
Edit2: Ok it seems that my changing my graphics backend to direct3d improved performance significantly, but I still have some moments of the game freezing for a second

So I am trying to figure out the ideal settings to run this game with, I've tried a ton of combinations and different methods and I always get the audio stutter except on D3D9, but even it skips and stutters some, aside from looking awful. I have no problem running newer PC games like shadow of mordor and others on high settings, so I'm fairly certain it's only an issue with the emulator. Any help would be appreciated.

Operating System: Windows 8.1 x64
Processor/CPU: Intel i5-421OU @1.7GHz 2.4 GHz
Video Card/GPU: NVIDIA GeForce830M 2GB
Memory/RAM: 6 GB DDR3L
Dolphin Revision Currently Using: 4.0 x64

@Wiral - The brief moments of stuttering are probably just Dolphin's shader cache trying to do its job. It may take a bit, but eventually it'll have enough generated shaders where it shouldn't slow down much or noticeably at all. Play around in the game and see what happens. Though, given your hardware, if you get any slowdowns even after a few hours of gameplay, you're looking at a CPU bottleneck. Your CPU just isn't fast enough for Dolphin in that case. If you do find yourself in that situation, you should follow this guide -> https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-laptop-performance-guide It may help you, so do take a look.

@Agalloch - Hate to be bring bad news, but it really looks like you've got a CPU bottleneck too. Dolphin and modern PC games are not equivalent pieces of software. Modern PC games rely on your GPU to do most of the heavy lifting, so even lower-end CPUs will handle a lot games without problems. Dolphin is a different beast. It uses the GPU to determine how high you can set your Internal Resolution and things like AA without turning your GPU into a bottleneck. In simpler terms, it determines how "pretty" things look before the GPU slows things down, but it isn't responsible for most of what Dolphin does. Dolphin is a very CPU-intensive application; generally, it's almost always recompiling PowerPC assembly into x86 or ARM assembly and executing what it generates.

So in short, Dolphin needs a strong CPU first and foremost, while a strong GPU is optional (and a "strong" GPU for Dolphin often includes a lot of mid-range GPUs). You're running Dolphin on a system that was not designed to thermally stress the CPU (Intel's -U line of products represent their Ultralow Voltage CPUs), so it's going to throttle-back frequently if you try to press it. What's more, your clocks are fairly low. You can follow the link I posted above, see if that does anything for you. One major thing you can do as well is upgrade from 4.0 to the latest development builds. Dolphin has gotten significantly faster since 4.0, to the point where 4.0 is decidedly not recommended, more often than not.

Hi, first time here using dolphin. xenoblade chronicles is my first game to use it with.

I have a couple of issues, could someone help me? I followed the YT tutorial.

i got the xbox360 controller working finally, do I need to adjust anything else?




also, I am using the PAL version, after applying the 30fps patch, I am getting this here every time I open up the emulator (also EU icon changed to JP?)





I also get suddenly this error after applying the 30fps patch




thanks in advance



//edit

is this HD? checking if the textures are being used or not