Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello

So first off. Long time fan, been following dolphin since its early pre-stable releases, but never bothered to say anything since I can't really contribute much.

I recently bought a copy of Samurai Warriors 3, being a massive koei fan and all. I wanted to play this game in something that actually allows me to see people in anything other then a blurry mess (Yay wii on HDTV ...), so I dumped my wii over and created a backup of Samurai Warriors 3. When I got to run this game its a terrible mess. The game runs slow as sin, the audio is all over the place, and OpenGL seems to completely disable half the textures in the game (Maps etc).

So first off, any hints on how I can make my copy of Samurai Warriors 3 run faster? I've got it very close with all the available features, but I simply cannot get it to run smooth in game. I suspect this may be one of the F-Zero variety, and be completely impossible to run full speed, simply because of the number of things going on screen. Koei games are pretty famous for causing frame rate drops on the normal machines, let alone with an emulator. But any idea's would be hot.

Also you know. OpenGL disabling textures and stuff is a little concerning.

Specs:
AMD Phenom II x6 1090T Thuban running at 3.9ghz oc
Nvidia EVGA 680 3gb
16gb 1666mhz Ripjaws across 4 sticks
WD Black 1TB HDD
Dolphin 4.0.1

Try using the latest dev versions, they're much faster than 4.0. Your CPU is pretty old, so if it's a very demanding game the audio will slowdown. You can mitigate this by using the OpenAL audio backend which has time-stretching. If graphics still are missing on the latest dev builds, try using EFB2Ram or D3D11. Screenshots would be appreciated of graphical bugs.

In-game slowdowns will not have audio problems, but if the emulator itself slows down to do insufficient processing power, the audio buffer runs out (I think, I'm not a technical wizard) and causes the stuttering that you hear. OpenAL postprocesses the audio with time-stretching, making it much more pleasant under slowdown.

I hope this helps.

(07-17-2014, 07:03 PM)JMC47 Wrote: [ -> ]Try using the latest dev versions, they're much faster than 4.0. Your CPU is pretty old, so if it's a very demanding game the audio will slowdown. You can mitigate this by using the OpenAL audio backend which has time-stretching. If graphics still are missing on the latest dev builds, try using EFB2Ram or D3D11. Screenshots would be appreciated of graphical bugs.

In-game slowdowns will not have audio problems, but if the emulator itself slows down to do insufficient processing power, the audio buffer runs out (I think, I'm not a technical wizard) and causes the stuttering that you hear. OpenAL postprocesses the audio with time-stretching, making it much more pleasant under slowdown.

I hope this helps.

Thank you. I will try and the latest development build. Though with the release build I found OpenAL to be the worst of all the choices. It slowed it down as if it was speaking in slow-mo, and when the latency was set to 0 the audio was so broken it hurt my ears (Crackling, audio bursts etc).

That's what time stretching does. You can't run the game full-speed, so audio cannot be played at full speed. The only thing that can be done are various tricks to make it sound better at lower speeds.

Right-click the game ->Properties -> Tick "Vbeam Speed Hack" and untick "Idle Skipping" .
Btw , do not use OpenGL with this game . You must use Direct3D backend , EFB copies to texture instead of Ram , 4x Internal Resolution , no AA , 16x Anisotropic Filtering , Force texture Filtering , Aspect Ratio = Stretch to Windows , untick "Ignore Format change " , Texture Cache Accuracy = normal (between "safe" and "fast")
If you do all of this , the audio stuttering problem and graphic glitches will be reduced to zero