(02-05-2014, 04:26 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]NJMike Wrote:I would have figured a powerful laptop like mine should be able to handle something as simple as Dolphin, if it can handle Crysis 2 decently.
Hmm, looks like you fell for the old "my PC can handle PC games, so it should handle Dolphin just fine" fallacy (note you're really not the first to think this).
Modern PC games rely heavily on the GPU for the bulk of their performance, generally speaking. Dolphin, on the other hand, relies greatly on the CPU for the bulk of its performance. The GPU in Dolphin decides how high you can raise things like Internal Resolution and Anti-aliasing without having the GPU become the system's bottleneck. If your GPU is sufficient for your IR and AA, then the rest lies with your CPU. Turning down the IR to 1x and disabling AA will do nothing for you if it's your CPU that's the bottleneck. Even though PC titles and emulators may all seems like "games" on the surface, they're two different categories of software doing their things in two very different ways. I doubt you'll find any PC title that dynamically recompiles PowerPC code into x86/x64 assembly or translates GC/Wii Flipper commands into equivalent OpenGL or D3D calls.
While your laptop may be fine for modern PC titles, it's pretty weak for Dolphin. In fact your CPU is just about average when it comes to laptops in Dolphin and it's not even close to being one of the best performers. That may sound kind of harsh to hear, but most of us have been running Dolphin and helping others run Dolphin to know what's going to run well and what won't (plus we have a couple of benchmarks available if you're interested in the raw data). Dolphin's a demanding application; there's no way around that fact. That's the price to pay for emulating a complex console like the GC on your laptop.
I totally understand all that you had said. Thanks for all the information.
Sorry for wasting so much time in here x.x I just am very new to this stuff, and wanted to see what I could do. I appreciated all the help.
Quick unrelated note: Shonumi, I have noticed that your personal blog link may seem to be broken, because I was unable to access it.
If your problem is just the choppy audio, you can try OpenAL audio backend... It won't make the game run faster, but the audio at least will stop stuttering...
(02-06-2014, 12:15 AM)Jhonn Wrote: [ -> ]If your problem is just the choppy audio, you can try OpenAL audio backend... It won't make the game run faster, but the audio at least will stop stuttering...
I tried OpenAL at 30 latency, while it does pretty much totally stop the painful audio skipping problem, it makes the audio lag behind the game by about one second, the audio is also a little bit sluggish and distorted or very slightly clicky.
Well, in that case, just getting a laptop with a faster processor will help =/
You can also try older versions, they are less demanding but less accurate... Also, they may have issues already solved in the latest development build, so, you won't get support in the forums when using anything older than the latest stable release (currently at 4.0). Give
r6515 a try
Don´t want to take down your idea, Jhonn, but in my opinion he doesn´t has to downgrade that far. Actually, 3.0 stable should be okay (my processor is weaker than his/her and most games run good/excellent there).
I recommended r6515 because it was the build with best ratio between compatibility/speed from the many I tested some time ago (while I still had a crappy Core 2 Duo and a GT440 as my main computer)...
(02-06-2014, 10:12 AM)Jhonn Wrote: [ -> ]Well, in that case, just getting a laptop with a faster processor will help =/
You can also try older versions, they are less demanding but less accurate... Also, they may have issues already solved in the latest development build, so, you won't get support in the forums when using anything older than the latest stable release (currently at 4.0). Give r6515 a try
Sir, I believe r6515 has solved my audio issue. I used Xaudio2 because OpenAL made the audio double-up. But the game plays absolutely flawlessly, both in video and audio. The only problem is this Dolphin version crashed a few times: Once when I tried to stop the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle emulation, and another time when I tried to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
In fact, in that revision you're using still uses the old audio engine that is buggy like a hell. It may not be the case for Sonic Adventure 2 but in many other games it causes issues like missing effects, background music cutting out, cracks/clicks and so on. Since you decided to use an old build, you won't get support, so you will have to deal with bugs like the ones you mentioned (none of them occur in 4.0 stable and current development builds)...
(02-06-2014, 04:28 PM)Jhonn Wrote: [ -> ]In fact, in that revision you're using still uses the old audio engine that is buggy like a hell. It may not be the case for Sonic Adventure 2 but in many other games it causes issues like missing effects, background music cutting out, cracks/clicks and so on. Since you decided to use an old build, you won't get support, so you will have to deal with bugs like the ones you mentioned (none of them occur in 4.0 stable and current development builds)...
I gotcha. I understand. Thank you for your help, though. I appreciate it.
Hello again. Is there a way that I can have the audio engine from r6515 work on 4.0? As far as I have experienced, I have not been experiencing any bugs at all. And even if I did, it'd probably be subtle, and nothing as severe as choppy or slow-mo audio that I get in 4.0 (it goes slow-mo and lags behind the game for me when using OpenAL, regardless of latency).
My CPU apparently can handle the emulator perfectly fine with its video and audio, as r6515 has proved to me. I just need to use that older audio engine. I can't use the r6515 anymore because it crashes due to "unknown pointer address prefix 61 report to the devs 0x0DA89D04" or whatever the error had said. I am aware that I cannot get any support since it's an older version. I just would like to know if I could swap out audio engines, if it's even that simple. Or at least some other sufficient alternative.