Dolphin is awesome and is great for running childhood games, but with the latest builds, there is some serious stuttering. Before you say that Intel HD 4000 is the worst card you have ever seen in your life, truth is, I run BF3 fine on medium for most options and ultra texture settings and play HL2 in 3D (rendering each frame 2x) with nice frame rates. I have been running Dolphin in the past fine and the last build I tried with no problems was -1391 but because I didn't use it for such a long time, there may be others that run fine as well.
The main question is, could you please fix the stuttering in the latest builds of Dolphin for Intel HD 4000? -1391 had the slightest bit of stuttering that was barely noticeable, but now, the games are almost unplayable (at least Wind Waker is). Until then, I guess I'll have to stick with the older build.
This isnt a development discussion, so you probably should have put it in support. And you are REALLY off base for your comparison. You DO realize that comparing a PC game to emulation is not a fair or even relevant comparison, correct?
The stuttering can be fixed by you getting more powerful hardware. If you arent able to do that then just use the lowest IR and no AA. If it still stutters, then you will be stuck using older builds until you can upgrade your hardware. You should not blame the emulator for your lack of computing horsepower.
At least those are my thoughts.
Quote:I guess I'll have to stick with the older build.
- Yes, this is what you need to do.
Dolphin really is an "emulator". It's main focus is to emulator a console with no discrimination for your hardware. Dolphin is also an application, the more an application grows ( and its features ) the more hardware will be required. Yes there is a ballence in there but in light of the new featurs 3.x has to offer it does require more from your computer. Not to mention its evolving and getting better at emulating more of what the console does. Some of these new features can be turned off but the rule of thumb is the same with any other application on the market. Take windows for example... You just need to upgrade, period.
tid bits of your set up
Asus Laptop: Z
enbook UX32A - Laptops has heat issue, physically speaking the CPUS have to work more efficiently. No laptop will ever out power a desktop.
OS: Windows 8 Pro, 64-Bit -
8 is bloated, nuf said.
CPU: Intel i5-3317U -
its a laptop chip, see above.
GPU: Intel HD 4000 -
You already comment on this, I agree, but gtx 660 ti's just play nice 
RAM: 4 GB and 5 GB SSD pagefile
Windows 8 system requirements
Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for
PAE, NX, and SSE2 <- if it needs it, its using it.
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver
Windows 7 system requirements
1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
@phly95
Is it actual stuttering or is your framerate/gamespeed dropping? Because those are not the same thing.
Also comparing dolphins performance to PC games is stupid and pointless. They're two very different types of applications.
Either upgrade your hardware or use an old build. Improving performance would require removing fixes for issues that involve improving accuracy. And developers certainly aren't going to stop improving dolphin just because some people have hardware that is too slow to run it well.
ulao Wrote:Asus Laptop: Zenbook UX32A - Laptops has heat issue, physically speaking the CPUS have to work more efficiently. No laptop will ever out power a desktop.
CPU: Intel i5-3317U - its a laptop chip, see above.
It's worse than that. He has an ultrabook, not a conventional laptop.
Ultrabooks are basically laptops designed to be ultra-thin, have high battery life, and a unibody chassis. In order to do this they have to use very low power parts since there is limited space for cooling and battery life is critical.
Typical laptops have a 35w CPU. High end laptops also typically a discrete GPU that hovers around 35w as well.
Ultrabooks use integrated graphics and have a low voltage cpu with a 11.5-17.5 watt TDP. Intel labels its ultra low power cpus the U series which you can see his ultrabook has. These are even slower than conventional laptop cpus.
ulao Wrote:OS: Windows 8 Pro, 64-Bit - 8 is bloated, nuf said.
No it's not. In fact it's objectively less bloated (less memory use and faster startup/shutdown times) and faster than windows 7 in every test I've ever seen.
Quote:No it's not.
Windows 8 uses a better approach when using energy and CPU management, particularly at idle. Windows 8 strives to get the processor cores back to idle as soon as possible. It does this in order to lower energy consumption and better battery life on laptops. So in a scene it will appear to be better at managing the cpu thus giving the illusion its doing a better job. Now, this is not necessary a bad a approach, I'm not suggesting its smoke and mirrors. Though, the first thing you go after to reach a stable OC is disabling these things. I'm not sure you can do that in the OS but the OS is uses the CPU technologies to do it (AFAIK). So disabling them in bios to OC a cpu would put an end to that.
Memory is much more advanced in win8, they completely rebuild the task managing system. This was mainly done for its ability to also run on mobile devices. Again, its a very good thing to employ, especially for m$ to do it. When it comes to Dolphin memory is not that important. A 2 gig system runs just fine. So I dont see how that would help. Not sasying you did, but covering that base.
Lastly windows 8 is written to adopt to mobile and desktops with a strong discrimination for favoring mobile devices. Any self respecting Program manager would highly question that concept. Yes it certainly is a smart move but efficient? Well M$ found that out for them selves. M$ has gone back to the drawing board. Read more here if you have not heard.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...33416.html
Sorry for the rant, dont mean to troll here but I do not share you optimist appraisal of win 8
Quote:It's worse than that.
My over site. Yes 100% correct that is near the worst of laptops you could have running dolphin.
None of that has anything to do with being bloated......
At this point I have to question whether you know what software bloat is. Here, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
Windows 8 regardless of whether you like it or not, whether it's been successful in the market, whether it runs dolphin any faster, and whether it targets mobile devices at the expense of desktop features is objectively the exact opposite of bloated. None of those things have anything to do with software bloat. There have been countless benchmarks done by countless users and professional organizations and all of them have reached the same conclusion with their data. Windows 8 uses less memory and cpu cycles than windows 7. It is therefore by definition less bloated. Bloated basically just means that it uses more memory and/or cpu cycles, which it clearly doesn't.
I really could care less what you think about it and you're certainly entitled to your opinions. But saying it's bloated compared to windows 7 is just a blatantly wrong statement that I'm going to have to correct you on.
ulao Wrote:Windows 8 uses a better approach when using energy and CPU management, particularly at idle. Windows 8 strives to get the processor cores back to idle as soon as possible. It does this in order to lower energy consumption and better battery life on laptops. So in a scene it will appear to be better at managing the cpu thus giving the illusion its doing a better job. Now, this is not necessary a bad a approach, I'm not suggesting its smoke and mirrors. Though, the first thing you go after to reach a stable OC is disabling these things. I'm not sure you can do that in the OS but the OS is uses the CPU technologies to do it (AFAIK). So disabling them in bios to OC a cpu would put an end to that.
You're being extremely vague here so I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm guessing you're either referring to C states, P states, or both. Until I know for sure I can't really comment on this but I'm fairly certain that windows 8 has made no significant changes to the management of either.
ulao Wrote:My over site. Yes 100% correct that is near the worst of laptops you could have running dolphin.
Well I'm not sure I would say that. It's nowhere near as bad as a netbook or an old laptop. My point was merely to point out that it should be referred to as an ultrabook and treated as such during any hardware analysis. The differences between conventional laptop and ultrabook hardware is quite significant.
Tried it out on the XPS desktop machine with a good graphics card and a better processor, and I still get stuttering so it definitely doesn't have to do with the fact I have a mobile processor. Also, this mobile processor is marked as a high-end cpu getting a 3,140* score so the CPU's good, and considering my past experience, the GPU's good enough, plus the computer with the more powerful specs is having the same problem at the same magnitude, so it has to do with some code changes. Is anyone else not having this issue? If so, how did you configure it.
*according to
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/
Maybe when the development stops someday, they will do the same as the Project64 team, some games that never were playable in any of the older versions somehow work just fine in version 2.0, (speedhacks->accuracy?) they still look like crap but at least they are playable now...
Killer Instinct Gold being an example of that.
Maybe it has something to do with caching display lists, but I have to sleep now so I'll have to check another time. Also, the size and energy efficiency of a PC doesn't matter, the model number and benchmark are what matters, so it doesn't matter if I have an ultrabook, it's the CPU and GPU that matter.
(08-15-2013, 12:57 PM)phly95 Wrote: [ -> ]Maybe it has something to do with caching display lists, but I have to sleep now so I'll have to check another time. Also, the size and energy efficiency of a PC doesn't matter, the model number and benchmark are what matters, so it doesn't matter if I have an ultrabook, it's the CPU and GPU that matter.
Seems, stuttering is greatly reduced by switching to OpenAL DSP on dedicated thread. Now all I can complain about now is it running slow on GPU intensive parts (stuttering applied everywhere before which was the problem), but that is probably caused by some "fix" that was made for graphics (which I can just use the old Dolphin as a fix), which the dolphin team doesn't like to fix, although now more than ever, speed is an important aspect to Dolphin, because it is trying to run on Android phones with much lower specs than any modern laptop.