Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Your clocks are fluctuating on lower-setting modes. Try enabling Per-Pixel lighting, as to stress the core more, at ~2xIR, see if it makes a difference.

If it makes it less laggy, disable PowerPlay by:
Enabling Unofficial Overclocking (without PowerPlay support)
over/underclocking

PPL was enabled during thefirst and also the second test which was at 3xIR. How do I disable powerplay, what is it, and is it safe?

As I recall my default settings without any graphical enhancement, PPL off too still caused a considerable amount of lag.

PowerPlay is just a thing in AMD cards which throttles them when in low-performance applications. It is also sometimes inaccurate when a high-performance application doesn't specifically ask for high-performance mode. It's completely safe to disable it, unless your GPU tends to get hot. If your GPU loads above 78 or idles above 45 (neither of which your GPU seems to do), do not disable power play.

To disable it, you really only have to enable unofficial overclocking in Afterburner (without PowerPlay support), and then change one of the clocks on your GPU. Unofficial overclocking's only dangerous if you don't overclock responsibly. All it does is allow Afterburner to access a feature of AMD GPUs which AMD does not support but has left in, which allows for a slightly more stable OC, better voltage control, and unlimited clock changes (of course, the lattermost doesn't mean that it increases your max stable). Note that reducing your clock by too much can, in fact, cause stability issues on some cards (my own is an example of such). And, also, the Afterburner betas and AMD driver betas have a few glitches that can work in tandem if you're not careful, and you can change your stock clock to your OC (though, it's unlikely, and I had to actually try doing this to get it to happen).

(04-11-2014, 03:20 AM)kinkinkijkin Wrote: [ -> ]PowerPlay is just a thing in AMD cards which throttles them when in low-performance applications. It is also sometimes inaccurate when a high-performance application doesn't specifically ask for high-performance mode. It's completely safe to disable it, unless your GPU tends to get hot. If your GPU loads above 78 or idles above 45 (neither of which your GPU seems to do), do not disable power play.

To disable it, you really only have to enable unofficial overclocking in Afterburner (without PowerPlay support), and then change one of the clocks on your GPU. Unofficial overclocking's only dangerous if you don't overclock responsibly. All it does is allow Afterburner to access a feature of AMD GPUs which AMD does not support but has left in, which allows for a slightly more stable OC, better voltage control, and unlimited clock changes (of course, the lattermost doesn't mean that it increases your max stable). Note that reducing your clock by too much can, in fact, cause stability issues on some cards (my own is an example of such). And, also, the Afterburner betas and AMD driver betas have a few glitches that can work in tandem if you're not careful, and you can change your stock clock to your OC (though, it's unlikely, and I had to actually try doing this to get it to happen).

I finally figured out how to enable unofficial overclocking by going in the .cfg file and changing"UnofficialOverclockingMode = 0" to 2, which apperantly turns off powerplay but I could not find a reference to this 'PowerPlay' in the .cgf, settings or anywhere. And changing the clock in what way? Would increasing/decreasing either core or memory clock by 1mhz do? I changed the power limit to 25% based on what I found out on other forums. Will test now.

Yes, it would work. You need a recent beta to disable PowerPlay using MSI Afterburner, though, I think, since older versions just made AMD unofficial overclocking support it. It really sounds like you're using an old version; the new betas have the unofficial overclocking setting in the settings.

(04-11-2014, 05:38 AM)kinkinkijkin Wrote: [ -> ]Yes, it would work. You need a recent beta to disable PowerPlay using MSI Afterburner, though, I think, since older versions just made AMD unofficial overclocking support it. It really sounds like you're using an old version; the new betas have the unofficial overclocking setting in the settings.

I have some good news at last! Got MSIAB beta, disabled ULPS (shouldn't affect me but still), enabled unofficial OC without powerplay, increased power limit to 25% but did not touch Clocks, and with a small run I did with Mario Kart [HLE + all speedhacks: Skip EFB, Ignore format, EFB Texture, Safe Cache, XFB disabled, Fast Depth, Per-pixel disabled] @ 4xIR + 8xQ CSAA it ran at ~60fps the entire race. If I reduce or indeed remove AA I can work with less speedhacks + LLE at about the same performance, although a map like Wario's Mine is much more demanding... i'll try that soon.

I did notice, however, that new "elements" and abrupt transitions into vast areas seem to cause lag spikes, not big enough to break the flow of gameplay too much but very noticable especially with the sound jutter and to avoid the spikes I had to turn down AA completely and even reduce IR to x3. For example in the Sherbet Land map doing a 180 turn and having the camera pan across the vast area with the big penguins in the middle causes a spike and then as whatshisface drops down indicating 'wrong way' there's another spike. This doesn't happen the second time in the same play and strangely isn't consistent as even on same setting the spike can just not happen at all.

The slowdowns you experienced are normal. They result from building the shader cache. They won't come back unless you delete your cache or Dolphin invalidates them in a future software release.

(04-11-2014, 06:50 AM)rokclimb15 Wrote: [ -> ]The slowdowns you experienced are normal. They result from building the shader cache. They won't come back unless you delete your cache or Dolphin invalidates them in a future software release.

They do come back though, just after restarting dolphin.

Speedhacks only affect the CPU. You can turn them off without sacrificing performance on that hardware.

(04-11-2014, 07:43 AM)kinkinkijkin Wrote: [ -> ]Speedhacks only affect the CPU. You can turn them off without sacrificing performance on that hardware.

I don't think it's sufficient, not with SMG2 and Kart at least, turning off all speedhacks + LLE brings cpu usage at ~80 on cores 1, 3 and 4 and core 2 @ 100% load! With AA turned off the lag spikes were a little more frequent than they would be at 8xQ AA and hacks turned on + HLE. I'll play around with it.

That said I think this merits a thanks to you and anyone who posted here, I'd never have figured all this out on my own. No really you guys kick ass