Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Don't reinstall it. It might be an issue that needs to be looked at by the devs if it can't be solved by the following.

What's your frame limit set to? If it's already on auto, set it to something else, hit OK, then change it back to auto.

If that didn't work, you'll have to check and edit the ini. Ignore the following if it did work.
Go to your Dolphin configuration folder (My Documents/Dolphin Emulator by default) and go in Config.
Open up Dolphin.ini and search for FrameLimit.
Make sure it says FrameLimit = 0x00000001

(10-13-2013, 08:49 PM)Garteal Wrote: [ -> ]Don't reinstall it. It might be an issue that needs to be looked at by the devs if it can't be solved by the following.

What's your frame limit set to? If it's already on auto, set it to something else, hit OK, then change it back to auto.

If that didn't work, you'll have to check and edit the ini. Ignore the following if it did work.
Go to your Dolphin configuration folder (My Documents/Dolphin Emulator by default) and go in Config.
Open up Dolphin.ini and search for FrameLimit.
Make sure it says FrameLimit = 0x00000001

Thanks for the reply.

Your suggestions didn't resolve it, unfortunately. I even tried deleting all the .ini files and reopening Dolphin, so that it would create them anew. Still wouldn't fix the framerate, though.

The pisser is that I'm able to run the first five minutes of Metroid Prime at higher settings than before without the framerate dipping below 60 (it hits 60 precisely at one point, during the intro sequence), thanks to the advice I've been given by others. The problem that I first came with has been solved... but now I have a new one.

[sigh]

What should I do about this? Do I need to report the bug somewhere?

Try setting framelimit to 60 or turning on vsync. Feel free to continue playing around with the framelimit option as well.

Also, make sure you're not holding the Tab key.

(10-14-2013, 05:51 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]Try setting framelimit to 60 or turning on vsync. Feel free to continue playing around with the framelimit option as well.

Also, make sure you're not holding the Tab key.

Thanks also.

I've tried setting framerate, toggling V-sync, swapping from one video backend to another... nothing.

For completeness, I should mention that I did have a similar problem with Dolphin 3.5, which is what came installed on my machine 2 weeks ago - but the throttling problem was intermittent, whereas now it's permanent. I figured because my graphics card was so new, maybe that was causing an issue - so I updated to Dolphin 4.0, and it worked fine for a couple of days. Then, as I've said, it just broke again.

It's really frustrating, because I've been blown-away at what an excellent job Dolphin seems to do when emulating GameCube - the first time I opened Super Monkey Ball and witnessed it with upscaling and anti-aliasing I was, like, "ummm... sorry, how the Hell is this possible?!".

Me and the Cube have 'unfinished business' - I bought one back in 2003, and racked-up handfuls of games for it, but I was so busy trying to get my legal career off the ground (long since abandonned...) that I never actually played the damn thing. I didn't finish Metroid Prime, I didn't finish The Wind Waker, I didn't finish Mario Sunshine, I didn't... actually, I don't remember finishing anything other than Rogue Leader and Resident Evil. And I must've had twenty games for it.

All the more reason for me to crack-on with Dolphin ASAP!!!

Sorry to re-post. I've not resorted to replying to myself...!!!

... I'm reading about how to overclock my Haswell i7 4770, and I'm coming to two conclusions:

1). I'm kinda queasy about faffing with parameters that I don't completely understand, and;

2). If I'm understanding my reading correctly, I won't get much extra 'oomph' out of the chip anyway.


According to a benchmarking site that I've looked at, my CPU's score is pretty much exactly 10,000 without an overclock. Frankly, that's just a number to me - I don't know whether that's fabulous, great, good, fine, alright, crap or shite for the purposes of running Dolphin (though, given that it's a new i7, I'll speculate that it's at least good...).

Can anyone tell me how much/little more I could strangle out of it with an overclock, and whether or not it would be worth my effort doing so? Running Dolphin is the most demanding thing that my computer has to do, by the looks of things - it makes mincemeat out of contemporary PC gaming requirements, and should continue to do so for a year or two - so if Dolphin's happy with a CPUMark of 10,000 then, frankly, so am I.

Apologies for the ongoing catalogue of questions. Thanks in advance,




DH.

You used to be able to get at most another 100-200 MHz out of a non-K chip, but I hear as of Haswell it's pretty much impossible to get anything more than what's advertised... Regardless, the 4770 *should* be near-perfect for almost every game – the 4670K (whose Dolphin performance at the same clocks is just a hair lower than a 4770K) is the most-commonly-recommended chip for Dolphin for good reason, as it's capable of running basically any game at full speed when overclocked.

Also, generic benchmark scores aren't that good a comparison – usually you need an app-specific benchmark for things like Dolphin (which we have in the form of the Wind Waker benchmark), plus some benchmarks are just not good benchmarks.

On the speed limiter issue, try wiping your ~/My Documents/Dolphin Emulator/Config/ directory. (You can leave your controller configs alone, I doubt they're breaking anything.)

(10-15-2013, 10:57 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: [ -> ]You used to be able to get at most another 100-200 MHz out of a non-K chip, but I hear as of Haswell it's pretty much impossible to get anything more than what's advertised... Regardless, the 4770 *should* be near-perfect for almost every game – the 4670K (whose Dolphin performance at the same clocks is just a hair lower than a 4770K) is the most-commonly-recommended chip for Dolphin for good reason, as it's capable of running basically any game at full speed when overclocked.

Also, generic benchmark scores aren't that good a comparison – usually you need an app-specific benchmark for things like Dolphin (which we have in the form of the Wind Waker benchmark), plus some benchmarks are just not good benchmarks.

On the speed limiter issue, try wiping your ~/My Documents/Dolphin Emulator/Config/ directory. (You can leave your controller configs alone, I doubt they're breaking anything.)

Thanks, mate. I appreciate the ongoing advice.

I'm probably gonna ask some ignorant questions here. Forgive me. I'm just trying to get up to speed:



Do I understand correctly that the CPU-side and GPU-side of Dolphin are entirely separate propositions, i.e. my extremely powerful GPU cannot 'help out' the CPU by taking work off its hands? Following that, the CPU will therefore determine how well the game runs, whereas the GPU will solely determine how pretty it looks?

Also, with regard to Intel Turboboost - am I correct in my understanding that my CPU has a base-clock of 3.4GHz, but has the ability to work at up-to 3.9GHz provided that heat and power-demands are not too great? If I do understand this correctly - given that Dolphin uses only two of my four available cores - is it reasonable to think that these two cores could be running at their peak 3.9GHz when running Dolphin? If so, I hardly see any sense in trying to raise that by a paltry hundred-or-so Mhz.



I take your point re the CPUMark being a theoretical measure, rather than one tethered to a real-world application. That said, would you mind clarifying something related to the CPUMarks of my CPU and that of the 4670k, that you mentioned...?



According to cpubenchmark.net, the 3.4Ghz 4670k has a CPUMark of about 7,500 pre-overclock, whereas my 3.4GHz 4770 (non-k) has one of about 10,000. Are you saying that an overclocked 4670k should/could show performance broadly comparable with that of a non-overclocked 4770 (depending, I suppose, on the extremity of the overclock...)?


EDIT: ... oh, and, also - I've already tried deleting my config files and having Dolphin make them again. Didn't work, I'm afraid.

Just to be clear on the throttling issue; you're saying your FPS goes as high as your CPU can handle, correct? (E.g. higher than Metroids 60FPS)
What happens if you hold down TAB and release it? (TAB releases the framelimit when you hold it down)
As a last resort, make a file name portable.txt next to Dolphin.exe and have it generate its new configs, etc in the Dolphin folder and see if you still get the issue.

Quote:Do I understand correctly that the CPU-side and GPU-side of Dolphin are entirely separate propositions, i.e. my extremely powerful GPU cannot 'help out' the CPU by taking work off its hands? Following that, the CPU will therefore determine how well the game runs, whereas the GPU will solely determine how pretty it looks?

Yes. Though with OpenGL and the Vertex Hack, the GPU can speed up the vertex streaming which decreases the CPU load. There's also things like OpenCL where the GPU helps out with texture streaming, but it barely makes a difference.

Quote:Also, with regard to Intel Turboboost - am I correct in my understanding that my CPU has a base-clock of 3.4GHz, but has the ability to work at up-to 3.9GHz provided that heat and power-demands are not too great? If I do understand this correctly - given that Dolphin uses only two of my four available cores - is it reasonable to think that these two cores could be running at their peak 3.9GHz when running Dolphin? If so, I hardly see any sense in trying to raise that by a paltry hundred-or-so Mhz.

Yes, but you'll only reach 3.9GHz with one core. Since Dolphin is primarily a dual-core application (tri-core with LLE on a seperate thread), it'll boost up to 3.8GHz on two cores. The 200MHz or so increase will help slightly, all the better if you just need a slight boost for that 60FPS.

Quote:That said, would you mind clarifying something related to the CPUMarks of my CPU and that of the 4670k, that you mentioned...?

He's referring to the Wind Waker benchmark. Check it out. Unfortunately we don't have stock clock results of the 4670K.

I promise I'll get round to doing stock clocks at some point.

(10-15-2013, 09:42 PM)Garteal Wrote: [ -> ]Just to be clear on the throttling issue; you're saying your FPS goes as high as your CPU can handle, correct? (E.g. higher than Metroids 60FPS)
What happens if you hold down TAB and release it? (TAB releases the framelimit when you hold it down)
As a last resort, make a file name portable.txt next to Dolphin.exe and have it generate its new configs, etc in the Dolphin folder and see if you still get the issue.

Quote:Do I understand correctly that the CPU-side and GPU-side of Dolphin are entirely separate propositions, i.e. my extremely powerful GPU cannot 'help out' the CPU by taking work off its hands? Following that, the CPU will therefore determine how well the game runs, whereas the GPU will solely determine how pretty it looks?

Yes. Though with OpenGL and the Vertex Hack, the GPU can over the vertex streaming from the CPU. There's also things like OpenCL where the GPU helps out with texture streaming, but it barely makes a difference.

Quote:
Also, with regard to Intel Turboboost - am I correct in my understanding that my CPU has a base-clock of 3.4GHz, but has the ability to work at up-to 3.9GHz provided that heat and power-demands are not too great? If I do understand this correctly - given that Dolphin uses only two of my four available cores - is it reasonable to think that these two cores could be running at their peak 3.9GHz when running Dolphin? If so, I hardly see any sense in trying to raise that by a paltry hundred-or-so Mhz.

Yes, but you'll only reach 3.9GHz with one core. Since Dolphin is primarily a dual-core application (tri-core with LLE on a seperate thread), it'll boost up to 3.8GHz on two cores. The 200MHz or so increase will help slightly, all the better if you just need a slight boost for that 60FPS.

Quote:That said, would you mind clarifying something related to the CPUMarks of my CPU and that of the 4670k, that you mentioned...?

He's referring to the Wind Waker benchmark. Check it out. Unfortunately we don't have stock clock results of the 4670K.

Thank you again, sir.

I haven't been home in the last two days, so I'll try out that Tab-holding thing later tonight.

When I run the first five minutes of Metroid Prime (by which I mean the intro sequence, the space station exterior, the first few tunnels, rooms and space pirates...), the frame-rate generally ticks along at between 90 and 130, dropping to 75ish when there's a lot going on (i.e. when I'm jumping into and out of Morph Ball mode over-and-over while spinning the camera around... just to be a dick), and hitting 60 precisely at only one moment during the intro sequence when the entirety of the space station is in view and Samus' ship is rotating in the foreground. That looks like a pretty challenging frame, to me. I doubt that anything 'indoors' is going to stress it as much as that. Although I live to be corrected...!!!

Thank you particularly re your advice on the CPU. I used to know tons about PCs, but I defected to consoles in 2002 and haven't been back - until 2 weeks ago, when I decided to drop the price of a Smartcar on an arcade cabinet. All the more reason to be cross that I was mistaken about the CPU that I was buying... that 'k' makes all the difference, I've learned to my cost!



It's not the end of the World, of course. Far from it. If I need to fit a new CPU in 6 months' time, I can do so. Just slightly irritating that I didn't get everything exactly right first time...

[sigh]

---

(10-15-2013, 09:49 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]I promise I'll get round to doing stock clocks at some point.

Thanks, also. It'd be good to know where I stand in the Dolphin-performance hierarchy - so that I know whether or not to be considering an upgrade sometime next year.