Hey guys. I recently bought a very powerful Alienware computer, that I was fully expecting to play Wii games without any slowdown issues.
However, I am getting unacceptable slowdowns in several games. The most awful one so far has been Super Mario Galaxy. Anytime there are star bits on the screen, or multiple large enemies, the frame rate drops to around 40fps and the game stutters like crazy. I've tried every backend with pretty much every setting available. I've messed with it for hours to no avail. Even at 1x internal resolution the problem persists. I have noticed that if I enable "Skip EFB access.." that the game plays smoother, but that disables key features of the game.
I've also noticed slowdowns in Metroid Prime Trilogy (as bad if not worse than SMG), Kirby's Epic Yarn, and Xenoblade. I haven't had a chance to test a whole lot of games because these issues have made me frustrated to the point of almost giving up.
And yet I can play Crysis 3 at max settings without issue..
My specs: Windows 8.1 64bit, Intel i7-4820 processor, Dual Nvidia GTX-770's in SLI (tried disabling SLI..no help), 16 gigs of ram.
What can possibly be wrong?
Thans
EvanOz85 Wrote:And yet I can play Crysis 3 at max settings without issue..
Dolphin is not a modern PC game. Modern PC games and emulators like Dolphin are two very different programs. Crysis 3 doesn't even come close to doing most of the same workloads that Dolphin does (recompiling PowerPC assembly for one). They're simply two separate beasts. Crysis 3 is a very GPU intensive program and relies on the GPU for a lot of its performance. Dolphin, on the other hand, is largely CPU intensive for many games. The GPU in Dolphin is responsible for things being able to raise your Internal Resolution and Anti-Aliasing without suffering slowdowns because of a GPU bottleneck. If you lower your IR and turn off all AA and you still get slowdowns, this is indicative of a CPU bottleneck, since your GPU is doing minimal work in that scenario.
Some other things to note, Dolphin does not take advantage of Hyper-Threading, and under normal circumstances it is only a dual-core application, so Windows Task Manager should show you roughly 25% of your available CPU resources being used. Lastly, Dolphin does not take advantage of SLI.
Now for the heart of your problem, your CPU is actually
very good for Dolphin. Haswell kicks ass for Dolphin (20+% increase in performance from Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge) whereas most applications only see a 5% gain. 3.7GHz should be enough to blow away most any game. KEY and Xenoblade Chronicles should not be giving you slowdowns, since I can run both without slowdowns and my specs are below yours. All Metroid Prime games are demanding, and MPT especially, but you still should be fine. SMG with LLE audio is very CPU intensive, but some users have reported playing this game under LLE audio with similar hardware with no overclocking. It looks like a case of bad Dolphin settings.
Even if you think you've tried every combo under the sun, it's always best to let another pair of eyes look at what you've got set. If you would, please take screenshots of the following: click the Graphics button and go to the General, Enhancements, and Hacks tabs, click on the Config tab and go to the General and Audio tabs, and finally right-click one game (say SMG for example) in Dolphin and go to Properties -> GameConfig. That should be all we need to see. Hopefully it's just a few things that need tweaks.
Actually, his CPU is an Ivy Bridge-E, not Haswell. Still, though, it's still a very fast cpu, just slightly slower than Haswell per clock.
Try the OpenGL backend with Vertex Streaming Hack enabled. It's actually faster (and vastly less problematic and shitty) than D3D9 on Nvidia cards/drivers.
(11-25-2013, 02:15 PM)drhycodan Wrote: [ -> ]Actually, his CPU is an Ivy Bridge-E, not Haswell. Still, though, it's still a very fast cpu, just slightly slower than Haswell per clock.
Ooops... Although
technically, I never said his CPU was Haswell, just that Haswell does very well with Dolphin :p My bad anyway, Intel needs consistent product naming schemes.
Ivy Bridge-E CPUs don't have the microarchitecture changes that make Haswell run so fast for Dolphin, so there's still going to be that huge gap between its performance and Haswell. Like I said, other applications don't see the crazy boost that Haswell brings to Dolphin, so while other benchmarks might show Ivy Bridge-E being slightly behind Haswell, it's probably not going to be the case for Dolphin. Still, 3.7GHz should be enough, at least for KEY and Xenoblade Chronicles, so something's up here.
@EvanOz85 - Your settings look fine. For Xenoblade Chronicles, set your Framelimit to Auto, Audio tends to run into some issues (sounds too fast, causes drops in battle). You should switch to OpenGL and enable the Vertex Streaming Hack; this is much faster than Direct3D9 (which is deprecated in the latest stable builds and removed in the latest development builds). It could also be the case where your GPU isn't kicking in properly. IIRC, Dolphin uses the GPU in such a way that some GPUs will stay "idling" at lower clocks. Grab something like GPU-Z or some other program that measures GPU activity and see if you're staying on the low-end of things when you shouldn't be. A cheap solution is to just raise your IR and AA to stress the GPU, thus taking it out of idling, but the real solution is to tell your GPU (in Nvidia's control panel) to "Prefer maxiumum performance" in your Power Management settings.
EDIT: Beaten by Paul about OGL + VSH
I swear to God, that option should just be renamed "MAKE EVERYTHING FASTER ON NVIDIA CARDS" so I don't have to fucking tell people to use it.
Thanks for all the tips, however none of them worked. OpenGL with the Vertex Streaming Hack actually seems to make it run slower. Setting the GPU to run at maximum performance had no effect. The only things that speed it up are enabling Skip EFB access, and 1x resolution with no AA. Anything above 1x is unplayable and even 1x still stutters.
My guess is that your problem is with shader caching, most games will stutter on their first run while shader cache is generated, second time you repeat the same part of a game it should not stutter. You shouldn't have general performance issues with that rig, moreover if you overclock.
V-Sync? Everything else in the screenshots that hasn't already been mentioned *looks* right.