Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello. Here goes. Thanks for reading. So I've been using Dolphin and I have it all set up very nicely to run seamlessly with XBMC and Steam Big Picture for all of my gaming needs. The only thing I'm trying to fix is a little bit of stuttering I get in some games. It would figure, the ones I like the most. More specifically I'm having minor stuttering in Smash Bros Brawl and Monster Hunter Tri. (Also Xenoblade Chronicles but not to such an extent.

The thing is, I've been watching videos, reading articles and checking out screen shots of people with even smaller system specs than me, and everything looks really beautiful and perfect while it seems they have no performance hit at all. I've tried running different versions of dolphin from 3.5-367 up to the newest 4.02 revision build and I can't get that fine line of performance + quality.

When I play Monster Hunter Tri on 4.02, the video seems to work very well. Looks beautiful through and through and the FPS feels smoth and nice, but for some reason the audio stutters when there's a lot going on on the screen. I changed the DSP settings between LLE and HLE, and I also dumped the DSP Roms from my Wii to use with LLE too. I've tried different audio backends too. XAudio2 seems to work the best for me. If I play Monster hunter on an older version (3.5-367) the game is much darker no matter what video backend I use.

Smash Brothers is a whole different story. It runs great once you're in the game and fighting, but when the fights first start it stutters like a biotch. Then it seems when a lot of effects happen or something new that hasn't occurred yet happens. it stutters some more. It seems to almost even itself out after 5 or more seconds.

My issues go down to very minimal if I use OpenGL. But even then I have to use 1x Native resolution, which defeats the purpose. My PC specs I would think are plenty to handle Dolphin. Can anyone give me an insight to what I could be tweaking?

Here are the settings that I have ENABLED:

Enabled Dual Core
Enabled Idle Skipping
Framerate: Auto
JIT Recompiler
DSP HLE
Audio Backend : XAudio2
Video: OpenGL
Fullscreen Res 1920x1080
Aspect Ratio: Auto
Fullscreen
VSync
IR: 1x Native
AA: None
AF: 16x
Post Processing: Off
Scaled EFB
Per Pixel Lighting
Skip EFB Access
Ignore Format Changes
EFB Copies:Texture. <----Tried turning this to RAM for New Super Mario Wii for the effects but forget it. Runs like garbage if I do.

I'd love to be able to turn up some settings to make the game look better. If I try to go IR 2x or even Auto games start to stutter enough to make it extremely annoying.

My PC Specs are:

cpu: i7-4770k Haswell
mobo: ASUS RoG Maximus VI Hero
ram: 16 Gigs GSkills Extreme 1866Mhz
video card: Gigabyte GTX 770 4GB version
OS HD: 250GB Samsung SSD
Gaming Storage HD: WD Black 1TB
Media HD: WD Green 4TB

Thanks for the time reading this. I appreciate it.

Try the latest developent builds (not the stable builds). 4.0.2 is actually getting pretty old right now and it's slower than the latest builds. Plus, the audio quality in the latest builds has massively improved.

Get the builds here: https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

I'm actually using the build that came out hours ago today. I can't figure out why it's acting this way. Are my specs not as good as I'm thinking they are?

If your specs aren't enough, then only computers existing in the holy realm of space angels would be adequate :/

To say the least, your hardware is top-tier stuff for Dolphin. It shouldn't be an issue. You could try the OpenAL audio backend and increase the latency as needed.

Alternatively, you might have an artificial bottleneck somewhere. You said you'd like to play with some enhancements; the GTX 770 should be able to play most games at a resolution of 4x Native without so much as blinking. Can you play at 2x at fullspeed? When the game stutters, do you see a drop in FPS? Can you play at 1x Native without stuttering or FPS drops? I have a suspicion, just trying to confirm it.

If I play a game at 1x, it seems to run pretty good. Changing my audio backend to OpenAL seems to make the stuttering go away for Smash Bros, but the problem there is I can't hear anything. I put the latency up higher and the game will run great looking, but then there's no audio. After about 30 seconds I start hearing audio like it's going in super slo mo.

But that gave me an idea to test the video quality by shutting the audio down completely. I disabled sound altogether and cranked up everything else as high as it would go. The games look fantastic, as if I was playing Monster Hunter on my Wii U when I had it, but of course no audio. Apparently I have something else wrong, or the audio really drags the whole thing down dramatically. Cranking up the video settings whle the audio is on any setting at all makes it run horrible.

So what's your suspicion?

Try 1X -with- audio. Does the stutter comes back on any sound backend other than OpenAL?

The games run pretty well on 1x and XAudio. They just look crappy. If that's the only way for smooth running I'll just hook the Wii back up.

So do you get FPS drops though? I was thinking if you get FPS drops, it could probably be due to your GPU running at low clock speed. This is a known issue, and it's solved by setting your GPU in Nvidia's driver to Prefer Maxmimum Peformance instead of choosing Adaptive Mode, or something along those lines.

I'll check that out after my wife and I are done with our movie. Thanks! (She hates me right now for taking time for this haha!)

(08-03-2014, 10:43 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]So do you get FPS drops though? I was thinking if you get FPS drops, it could probably be due to your GPU running at low clock speed. This is a known issue, and it's solved by setting your GPU in Nvidia's driver to Prefer Maxmimum Peformance instead of choosing Adaptive Mode, or something along those lines.

Thanks a lot for your suggestion! I've been a computer savvy guy for many years and I didn't think of changing the power settings on the video card to max performance. Apparently what happens is that when my FPS gets TOO high. the card powers down some to save energy while still keeping a framerate stable. Too bad it does a lousy job at kicking back in fast enough. haha. But yeah, I have everything cranked to the max with DSP LLE running XAudio2 and everything is running brilliant. I got some slowdowns during explosions on Smash Bros Brawl but all I had to do to fix that was turn down AA. I don't need AA anyway with the res cranked up. Thanks again for your help! Problem solved!