Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello everyone,

I've been using Dolphin for quite some time now and it worked all fine. However, I recently upgraded my PC and now I'm experiencing frequent lag spikes.
I played around with settings and stuff, yet nothing seems to have fixed it.

I dumped the following games:
Mario Football (WII+GCN)
SSBB (WII)
SSBM (GCN)
Pokemon Battle Revolution (WII)
Pokemon Colosseum (GCN)
Last Story (WII)

This is inside my PC:
Operating System
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
- AMD FX-8350- 36 °C
- Vishera 32nm Technology
RAM
- 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
- ASRock 970 Extreme4 (CPUSocket)- 35 °C
Graphics
- E2442 (1920x1080@60Hz)
- HP L1740 (1280x1024@60Hz)
- hp L1702 (1280x1024@60Hz)
- 2048MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series (XFX Pine Group)- 37 °C
- 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 (MSI)- 39 °C
- CrossFire Disabled
Storage
- 298GB Western Digital WDC WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0 ATA Device (SATA)- 31 °C
- 149GB FUJITSU MHZ2160BH G2 ATA Device (SATA)- 31 °C
- 111GB OCZ-VERTEX3 ATA Device (SSD)- 30 °C
- 30GB JetFlash Transcend 32GB USB Device (USB)
- 1GB ASRock RAM Disk SCSI Disk Device (File-backed Virtual)
Optical Drives
- No optical disk drives detected
Audio
- AMD High Definition Audio Device
Operating System
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
- Computer type: Desktop
Dolphin Version
- Dolphin 4.0

These are my Dolphin settings:
Config
- General
- > Enable Dual Core
- > Enable Idle Skipping
- > Disable Cheats
- > Framelimit: 60; limit by fps on
- > JIT Recompiler
- Audio
- > DSP HLE
- > Audio Backend: XAudio2
Graphics
- General
- > Backend: D3D11
- > Adapter: AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
- > Fullscreen Resolution & Aspect Ratio: Auto
- > Disabled V-Sync
- > Enabled Fullscreen
- Enhancements
- > Internal Resolution: Auto (Window Size)
- > Anti-Aliasing: None
- > Anisotropic Filtering: 1x
- > Enabled Scaled EFB Copy
- > Disabled Fog
- Hacks
- > Skip EFB Access from CPU
- > Ignore Format Changes
- > EFB Copies: Texture
- > Texture Cache: Fast
- > External Frame Buffer: Disabled
- > Fast Depth Calculation: Enabled

Notes:
I have an SSD (C:) which I run my OS on.
My games are dumped on an USB 2.0 (H:).
The Dolphin directory is stored on an HDD (E:).

Thank you in advance

1- You don´t even need to check limit by FPS.

2- AMD CPUs tend to be slower (in most cases) than Intels´ due to lower SCP -single core performance-.

3- Try any recent dev build and use OpenGL backend. It´s actually faster than D3D.

4- You won´t cut Last Story with that CPU. (It will run, but VERY slow).

5- Try overclocking the CPU a bit.

DJBarry,

2 - If the CPU isn't what he upgraded, this doesn't hold relevance. At all. Seriously.

3 - OGL runs slower on AMD GPUs. In fact, I've measured a hilarious 10 fps drop on my own card when switching to OGL. What he SHOULD do is try OGL with the vertex streaming hack, or D3D. But, his GPU is more than adequate, so it won't make a massive difference.

5 - Unless he has water, that's not happening. The 8-core visheras get REALLY hot at high load, and demand large voltage raises to be stable when OCed.

EDIT: What did you upgrade?

1) Yeah, I second DJBarry, uncheck limit by fps, and put it back to auto

2) @kinkinkijkin: Well, the OP didn't specify what was upgraded. And DJBarry was just stating the facts that we always state when people come in here with AMD CPUs

3) OpenGL has been getting faster and faster recently. In the recent dev builds, OGL is faster than D3D on both AMD and Nvidia due the pinned_memory OpenGL extension for AMD and buffer_storage for Nvidia

5) Even a mild overclock will help

And a mild overclock without either a magical air cooler or water on that CPU will make the temperatures far more than mild.

Well, I can tell you I can run Last Story fine. I use Razer's Game Booster to put all unnecessary processes down.
I upgraded my whole pc. Before the upgrade I had an Intel Quad Core2 and the MSI NVidea 610GT as a gfx card, you cant tell me that's a better combination.

Aside from all, Limit by FPS was still on from a check I made. Last Story went on 300FPS.
I play high def battlefield 4 on ultra res as well, so I have my doubts about the hardware seriously.
I checked a sticky (Dolphin CPU hierarchy) which said AMD FX series perform 'Very Fast'.

All it lacks is smooth play at times.

The highest Core 2 Quads have near-equal IPCs to the FX-6300. Not saying much, since the 6300 is rubbish and I don't know why people don't spend the extra $10 for the 6350, but it's still a reality.

EDIT: Really, FX-6300 should be category 3 or 4. But that has nothing to do with your processor; it performs per-core, on par with a 6300.

oh wait

PC games and Dolphin are two very different programs. PC games rely heavily on the GPU, while Dolphin requires strong single-core performance on the CPU, using only two threads normally, three max if you have DSP on thread turned on (although its been giving slowdowns recently)

Your current CPU is ok for dolphin. Its not the best for Dolphin, and is behind current Intel CPUs in single-core performance. At stock speeds, the single-core performance is below an i5-2500k.

Or, in AMD terms, why do people keep coming here and asking why their 6300 or 8320/8350 doesn't perform like a 9590 in dolphin?

@NV need to update his Dolphin CPU hierarchy which is really misleading . This is not the first time someone like the @OP complained