Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi, I'm trying to play Zelda Skyward Sword for the Wii on Dolphin. I'm running the game fine except for this little issue. Basically there are like these little hicks or stutters or freezes, call it what you want, every now and then. It tells me I run at 30 FPS most of the time except the occasional bigger stutter which might bring me down to 28-29. Kind of like the background needs to load and the game freezes for a fraction of a second. It's happening when I play and in cinematics sometimes too. I could upload a video if you want. Considering my CPU is using like 20% of its capacity and whether I'm recording with fraps or not doesn't change anything in the gameplay at all, I feel like it's not my PC who can't handle the game but maybe more a technical issue. I tried lowering the fullscreen resolution and the internal resolution from 4x to 1x and it still occurs which also makes me believe it has nothing to do with my PC specs. The sound is not affected by this by the way. It kind of feels like in Minecraft (if any of you have played it) when loading a chunk and the game kind of freezes for a second only it's more subtle.

My specs are :

Nvidia Geforce GTX 690 graphics card
Intel i7-3930k overclocked to 4.4Ghz
Corsair Vengeance 32GB RAM

I'm running the R7719M build of Dolphin as it was recommended to me (apparently later versions have an issue with a shader update)

Anyway if any of you tech wizards know what might cause this, I'd appreciate it a ton! Thanks in advance.

We do not support users using builds older than 4.0; there are simply too many bugs that have been fixed in more recent versions. If you're having a Pixel Shader Error, you may wanna update your Video Card Drivers and use OGL in this game.

If you're deadset at using a way, way, WAY old build, you won't receive much assistance, unfortunately.

And where he says you won't receive much assistance, he means any at all, as it's really likely whatever build you're using is causing the issue, and one of the several thousand revisions since has fixed the issue.

Alright, so I switched to Dolphin 4.0 with pretty much the same settings and still get the same problem, but now I also get some sound stutters as well. Additionally there seems to be a spot on the screen where the models and such become blurry, I took a screencap where you clearly see a part of Zelda's hair being messed up.



Really sorry for all the trouble :S

Sound stutters happen when the game isn't running at fullspeed. If you use the absolute latest dev build (4.0-1442 at the time of writing), you'll find that there are better ways of masking this than in 4.0, and it might well run faster due to a load of major optimisations over recent months, so it's less likely to skip in the first place. You may find that you have to roll back your nVidia driver version by a few weeks if you use OpenGL, due to an incompatibility added recently. This might have been fixed, though.

Also, I can't see the issue in that screenshot, but there are a quite few possible causes of graphical bugs which have been eliminated since 4.0, so that's another reason to check the latest dev build out. It might help us to see exactly what you're describing, though, if you link an image at higher than 1x IR and without whatever scaling has happened to that one, or maybe a video.

As your original issue hasn't gone away, it could just be the shader cache being generated. As you get further into the game, or replay bits you've already done, you'll find this disappears. It'll carry across from versions 4.0+, so if you load the game back up in the latest dev build, and redo what you did in 4.0, you might well find it's gone.

So I made absolutely sure I had the latest version 4.0-1442. same audio and video stutters and that weird spot where it seems the internal resolution is set at 1x (look on the right side, her hair, neck, the sailcloth and corner of her mouth as well). It does that at any time whenever a model appears in that zone. I'll post a video is I absolutely have to but I'm not sure how useful it will be with Youtube's compression and all. It might be hard to see.

Sorry, I misunderstood originally, as what's happening is pretty much the exact opposite of a blur. Thanks for clarifying.

Unfortunately, I don't know what would cause this, but it might be something like scaled EFB copies needing changing.

Make sure Ignore Format Changes is unchecked.

Alright little update guys! I managed to get rid of the micro stutters AND that weird graphical bug that I've shown before. However it created a new issue, instead of the micro stutters every few seconds, I now get like a maybe 1 second long video and audio stutter as if the emulator is slowing down, it usually happens when I enter in a room or open a door or when I get my map, though it also happens a bit randomly every few minutes or so. I recorded a video although those weren't the best examples, I was in a hurry and couldn't get worse ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJVUlQtNvkQ

Also, I took screencaps of my dolphin settings :

Put Framelimit to auto, check the render to main window, set full screen resolution to auto, and enable per-pixel lighting.

To get a better looking picture, try increasing the AA/AF to like 8x each. That will eliminate the jagged edges on things