Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I did search for existing threads on this, didn't come up with much.

I'm finding that the recent builds of Dolphin are far far worse for performance vs the latest stable. There are various examples of this, but the most notable appears to be Mario Galaxy 1 and 2. In the hub-world I can barely scrape together 40fps, dipping to 30fps. In the stable build I have a solid 60fps non-stop. In both cases, "Skip EFB Access from CPU" is enabled (yes, in the latest builds I did make sure to enter the graphics settings post game load to override the default).

Is this a performance loss due to a stability/accuracy gain? Or am I seeing a bug/issue?

My hardware for reference:

Intel i5 750 @ 2.67Ghz
16GB RAM
NVidia GTX570

I'm happy to test and supply any info required to get to the bottom of this, unless there is nothing to work out!

What's your internal resolution set to? It's well known that tev fixes new, which fixed tons of problems in the emulator, put more strain on the graphics cards at higher internal resolutions.

I run with 1080p IR. I just tested using native IR. There is no change in FPS at all, matches 1 for 1 to that of 1080p IR.

Can you figure out whereabouts the slowdown began, that may narrow down what's going on; whether it's on your side, or something in Dolphin.

What sound backend? DSound is broken for me and I experienced massive performance issues with it then switched back to XAudio2 and performance is fine.

(06-01-2014, 02:34 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]What sound backend? DSound is broken for me and I experienced massive performance issues with it then switched back to XAudio2 and performance is fine.

I don't even think Dsound is implemented very well at all in newer versions of Windows, I've kept Dolphin on using the XAudio2 API for a long time, never switched back. I've noticed speed degradation as well, even at 2 x IR, which my GPU shouldn't have really any trouble handling with a Core i5.

DSound is as old as Windows XP. Even on X360 it was Xaudio2, that's 9 years ago ( 9 years is like two or three eternity in computer science ) ! Just drop it, it is a non sense to keep that deprecated stuff just to keep people reporting bugs…

Well up until recently DSound was working fine regardless of what Windows operating system. So DSound is deprecated just like Dinput and Direct2D/GDI etc..? Regardless DSound was working fine but some commit changed that and I don't feel like tracking which commit due to insufficient bandwidth, caps and lack of time to bother. Even OpenAL is broken afaik, tried that backend recently and audio is terrible compared to XAudio2. But I agree DSound is a bit redundant when XAudio2 works fine and XP/32-bit is unsupported now so no need to keep a dying horse around that doesn't run as well as it used to. Not that I care since I use XAudio2 which works fine but I was testing the other backends for some reason and found DSound to have a severe performance regression that lags the emulator.

The reason has already been found; it's down to whether it survives to get fixed or is removed now.

Ok, so this seems to have become a "DSound sucks" topic I don't use DSound, I know well how much it sucks. XAudio is all I have every used. I'll dig back through old builds and see if I can spot when it got so slow. Its definitely a version thing and not a local change to my setup or machine, given that current stable runs at 100% speed. I'll let you know what I find.