Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I apologize if this is obvious, or already answered, but I searched, I looked around, I tried to understand, but I couldn't.

3.5 performance compared to 3.0 seems to be quite abysmal at times. I only play gamecube games here. And I'm here asking why.

First, I notice in both F-Zero GX and Metroid Prime that whenever the FPS goes down, even just slightly, the audio starts to crack or make noises and its awful. You feel the slightest amount of lag. But in 3.0, you can uncheck Audio Throttle, and it goes away. Unless the FPS goes really low, you barely feel it.

That option is nowhere to be seen in 3.5. Yes, you can limit the FPS by Audio in General/Framelimit, but I don't have that selected. So its disabled, yet at 95% speed the audio skips and glitches.


I've tried playing Metroid Prime in 3.0 and it works fine, FPS wise. However there's a lot of sound not playing properly, seems 3.5 did a lot to help the game. Fine, but when I use 3.5, I get a lot more lag at various points in the intro where has in 3.0, it runs almost flawlessly, all the time. Of course with the unavoidable audio skipping in 3.5 (thanks to no way to disable audio throttle like in 3.0), it feels worse for that.


This isn't just Metroid Prime. I struggeld getting F-Zero GX running properly. Then I just put 3.0 on top, disabled Audio Throttle and the game works flawlessly.

What am I missing? I'd only use 3.0, but very big improvements seems to exist in the newer ones which are very useful for games like Metroid Prime. This isn't a whining post: just trying to understand. In short, why is there no proper way to disable Audio Throttle like in 3.0, and why is overal performance so much worse in 3.5?

Dolphin 3.5 is slower, because of improvements, bugfixes, new code etc. - That's it.

Alright. I'll take as a "making an emulator of that kind better is amazingly complex and making things work better or fixing something can sacrifice performance, etc".

What about audio throttle, however? Is there no way for 3.5 to -not- skip audio at the slightest bit of lag?

The current development revisions have two major improvements to audio which might help you - new-ax-hle, a much more accurate implementation of HLE audio (though it only affects games not made by Nintendo R&D1), and the OpenAL audio backend, which does timestretching for audio instead of making it stutter. Try using OpenAL on a newer revision.

(Note that this won't really help your performance problem, just your audio issues.)

Thanks! That branch is definitely a lot better for the audio.