Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello everyone!

Over the past few days my friend and I have been having issues playing Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker on his computer. In short, the issue is that although the game has a full 30fps, there are occasional "jumps" as if a frame is being dropped. This occurs once every 5-10 seconds. This happens on both LLE and HLE and with any graphical engine (haven't tried software though). Here are his specs:

ASRock Z77 Extreme4
Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge @ 4.2 GHz
CORSAIR XMS32x4[color=#000000] GiB[/color]
[color=#000000][/color]Off the top of my head, one of the Radeon HD 6770 models.


What we've tried:

• Two different computers. My computer, a Phenom II X6 @ 3.6 GHz / 10 GiB DDR3 / AMD Radeon HD 6970, runs it smoothly with LLE and DX9.
• LLE / HLE
• Audio back engines (DSound vs XAudio)
• Switching to LLE with accurate vbeam / idle skipping and in different combinations of both.
• All graphical engines except software rendering.
• Playing with the framelimiter. Off causes it to go well over 30 and the game to be superfast. This seems to fix the skipping issue but is not a solution. Auto/audio does nothing special.
• Different combinations of graphical options, including running in windowed and different IRs/AA settings.
• Turning off vsync and unplugging other USB devices.
• A different monitor and different refresh rates on both.
• Lock to core.
• Combinations of various tweaks like the fast vs safe texture stuff, no virtual framebuffer, etc.
• Dolphin 3.5 and a "dirty" Dolphin 3.0-385 build.

Now all of this being said, I had considered maybe his computer couldn't handle it. I don't believe this to be the case, as his graphics card is not being maxed out by Wind Waker according to the CCC. Additionally, he played through SMG1/2 with full 60 and higher settings than Wind Waker without this issue. With all of this stuff being listed, please do feel free to ask me to try a certain combination of something again. I troubleshot this for a few hours and I may have missed something...

I've been scouring the forums for the past day now and haven't found a solution. Please let me know if you guys know of something I can do. The game is playable, this frame drop issue is just sort of annoying.

Edit: I've also wondered if this may be a hardware issue. Dolphin detects 8 logical threads and the i3570k, to my knowledge, does not have hyperthreading. If Dolphin were intermittently putting two threads on the same core this could cause an issue... Though lock to cores should resolve this.

TL;DR: Windwaker is stuttering with full fps every 5-10s.

Quote:I had considered maybe his computer couldn't handle it

That's not true , his CPU is much much faster than yours (in Dolphin) . Phenom II is slower than Core 2 Quad clock for clock , Dolphin is a dual core application...

Quote:Dolphin detects 8 logical threads

It's normal .

The AMD 6770 has 76.8 GB/s memory bandwidth . As long as he use 4x Internal Resolution , no AA , 16xAF , he should be fine (maybe he use too much AA -> GPU bottleneck but you just said he is fine with demanding game SMG ...)

Wind Waker use "EFB copies to Ram" as default via ini file , not sure it's a problem for his CPU but my laptop CPU can handle it
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-tloz-wind-waker-low-speed-help

Thanks for your response.

I'm well aware how much faster his processor is than mine, I assisted him in purchasing to make sure of that. SMG2 played liquid smooth with LLE on his, on mine I could hardly use HLE. This holds true for most games.

If the 8 logical cores is normal then I'm at a complete loss. We run it at Auto IR with no AA or Anistropic. His dolphin folder has been copied from mine and we have also tried a fresh one, same results.

I'll try to get a video and a FPS log later today.

Quote:If the 8 logical cores is normal then I'm at a complete loss

Dolphin detects 8 logical cores on my dual core CPU xD .

Off topic . Could you please try to benchmark his CPU and your CPu and post in this thread later
The result is in post#137 page 14

Sure thing, I'd be happy to help.

Problem solved, graphics card is occasionally strained to 99%. CCC doesn't show it due to its low refresh rate but 1x IR runs like a dream.

Thanks NaturalViolence for helping.

For the record his GPU was running at idle clocks and he needed to change the power settings in the driver control panel.

I should have posted the thread link, but was too lazy.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=338906

That's new to me , I thought AMD 7000 series would be the only series which cause this GPU idle issue

Nope. AMD HD6000, AMD HD7000, and nvidia 600 series all have issues with power saving.