Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi everybody,

I'm actually running Dolphin 3.5-1026 under OpenSuse 12.2 (X64) on my laptop (intel i7@1.75GHz, 8GB RAM and 1.5GB Nvidia GTX-460M using NVIDIA 304.64 drivers). I used to run Dolphin under Win7 (x64) on dual boot very well but I'm trying to optimize it also on my main OS, OpenSuse.

The thing is that no matter the game I run I have excellent FPS, let's say 24-30 / 45-60, and all of the sudden I hear the laptop fans starting up and FPS dropping to 10 / 18 FPS with a super choppy performance. This lasts for around 10 seconds and then back to full speed... repeating the process every 30 seconds. I know that my hardware is fine to run Dolphin and I'm not pretending full speed all the time in all games, but I think I should be able to do something to correct this behavior. I don't know if this is kind of a "buffering" or what, but I reproduce the behaviour in every game I play (both Wii and GC ones) Of course I didn't have this problem under Windows so is something related to my Linux partition.

Regarding Dolphin configurations, I leave everything to standard, only change Anisotropic filtering to 16X and Antialiasing to 2X, but that is not the cause, as "none" & 1X have the same effect.

Anyone who can give me an orientation of what should I try or if there is another "optimized" branch to try to compile will be very welcome!
Thanks a lot!

Quote: let's say 24-30 / 45-60, and all of the sudden I hear the laptop fans starting up and FPS dropping to 10 / 18 FPS with a super choppy performance.

Your laptop is overheating
Use Realtemp to check your CPU turbo boost clock speed when DOlphin is running and overheating

Quote:intel i7 @ 1.75GHz
I know that my hardware is fine to run Dolphin

That's your CPU base clock . Turbo Boost should jump in and boost it to 2.5GHz if you CPU did not overheat
1.75GHz CPU is too slow for Dolphin no matter i7 or not
Why do most people here have i5 2500k/3570k @ 4.2-4.8GHz ?

(03-17-2013, 01:11 PM)admin89 Wrote: [ -> ]Your laptop is overheating
Use Realtemp to check your CPU turbo boost clock speed when DOlphin is running and overheating

Hi admin89! Well, I took your advice and was playing a bit monitoring frequencies and temperatures in my machine while playing on Dolphin. Realtemp is not available for Linux (or at least I haven't found it) but don't worry, I have tools here to do that job. I checked the frequencies with a tool called cpupower. While playing normally a game yes, the frequencies were at ~2.1GHz, but when things start to get choppy, CPU freq. drops to minimum.. 0.933GHz. The strange thing is that, despite coolers are on, temperature is constant on the different cores with values from 73 to 80C ...that is not overheating, sure. I remember playing in my Win7 partition for long time and temp. being ~95C ...that was kind of risky for a laptop.

Well, what I can see is that maybe need to play with some sort of governor settings to allow the CPU to give priority and power to Dolphin. ..I'll keep reading and also I will do the same test on Windows, to see frequencies and temps. Nevertheless Win is another story, as the graphics are handle by DirectX and OpenGL is not the same running on Win than on Linux. ...I'm affraid I wouldn't be comparing apples to apples. But for a refference of freq and temps. I think it will be fine.

Quote:Why do most people here have i5 2500k/3570k @ 4.2-4.8GHz ?

Regarding this, I think you are talking about desktop processors, not laptops...

Ok, I'll post later!
Thanks for stopping by!

Quote: While playing normally a game yes, the frequencies were at ~2.1GHz, but when things start to get choppy, CPU freq. drops to minimum.. 0.933GHz
remember playing in my Win7 partition for long time and temp. being ~95C

That's overheating for sure . CPU automatically underclock to reduce the temp !

Quote:Regarding this, I think you are talking about desktop processors, not laptops...

No , I just point out why your 1.75GHz CPU is slow for Dolphin
Dolphin is a dual core application btw

Yes! 95C is FOR SURE Overheating, but even at that temperature, I have no FPS drops on Windows. @~75 on Linux I have the CPU dropping like hell! That was my point. Thanks and see you!

I believe it has nothing to do with Dolphin
Maybe Linux is more sensitive than Windows
You will need a ThrottleStop-like program for Linux.
Google "ThrottleStop Linux" , you will find many interesting results