Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(09-06-2014, 03:02 PM)triad Wrote: [ -> ]

(09-06-2014, 02:15 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]I have no issues on my first gen OC'd i7 so long as the game runs full speed

Unless your system is OC'd by more than 50% (to more than 5 GHz) or a few hundred MHz makes dolphin run 50% faster, I find it very hard to believe you can get 100% VPS. At times I'm lucky to get 40%. (In some games... in fairness there are a few games that do get 100% comfortably, but not the ones I'm most interested in playing.)

Well, I don't know what you're doing wrong but I get 100% VPS in most games with a Q6600 @ 3.20GHz, which is a crappy CPU for Dolphin.

OC there are a few games I can't play (The Last Story for example).

^ That game drops fps even on a real Wii afaik which *surprise* exhibits the same behavior with audio when fps drops. At least that is what I read but it's been a bit since I read that so may not be completely accurate.

Oh I can get full speed on lots of games such as Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, ZTP Hyrule Field at 21fps without speed hack, Resident Evils and a ton more games. Only very few games get lower fps but audio isn't too bad regardless of dropping fps.

Btw IR slows down games quite a bit. Anything past 2x IR for Dolphin and my GTX 460 results losing a fair bit of fps. As long as kept at 2x IR such games run full speed. Accuracy options such as EFB -> Ram are slower with OGL for some odd reason. With DX11 full speed with EFB to ram, switch to OGL and the same game drops nearly half it's fps. Generally OGL is much much faster with Nvidia cards (not sure about AMD) than DX11 currently is.

Xtreme2damax Wrote:^ That game drops fps even on a real Wii afaik which *surprise* exhibits the same behavior with audio when fps drops. At least that is what I read but it's been a bit since I read that so may not be completely accurate.

You talking about TLS? That game only drops FPS, the audio remains unaffected. I assume even the developers knew how hard they were pushing the Wii, but some baseline of quality had to be maintained. Although FPS were sacrificed, they kept the DSP supplied with constant audio data.

Ah I see well I was wrong on that part. But other than that game other games should behave the same on the real Wii as they do dolphin audio-wise when fps drops?

To the guy doubting I get full speed here are some screenies I took the liberty of capturing. All default performance settings 1920 x 1200 (16:9) 2x IR etc.. and fps limit off.



OMG look at those awesome fps in Hyrule Field for ZTP without the speed hack.

Xtreme2damax Wrote:But other than that game other games should behave the same on the real Wii as they do dolphin audio-wise when fps drops?

It depends on how the developers coded things. If they didn't program their games like TLS where audio was always supplied to the DSP regardless if the GPU was at its limits, then sure, audio would get choppy. Xenoblade Chronicles drops its FPS iirc, but the audio remains constant. I think No More Heroes may be an example where the FPS drops and you can hear the audio suffer for a second, though I have not confirmed it, never having played it :p

(09-06-2014, 03:02 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]With sufficient hardware, Dolphin runs just fine, yes even on Linux. I'm currently underclocked to 2.3GHz, and most games run without issue.

That is definitely not my experience. G6SE7D and RO7E7D I'm most familiar with and generally lucky to get 60% (with almost 50% higher CPU speed than you're claiming), and I've seen as bad as 30%-ish (especialy in the dream sequences in RO7E7D). I want to say RO8E7D is comparable. That sound dump is from RO7E7D when it's getting around 55%. This is with both 3.5 (from rpmfusion, so theoretically not a build issue on my end, except GWLE6L which doesn't run on 3.5) and 4.x (pretty much any master since July); I've yet to see any noteworthy speedup in 4.x compared to 3.5. Pre-rendered video in all of the above especially are well under 100% (55%-70% in RO7E7D, 30% or even 10% in RO8E7D).

Dual core on, auto framelimit, JIT, idle skipping on, DSP HLE, XFB disabled, EFB to texture¹, OpenMP texture decoding on... I've got a bunch of graphics settings cranked up (resolution, 4x MSAA, per-pixel light) but I've poked occasionally and these don't affect VPS (and only per-pixel lighting affects FPS, and even then not so much that you'd notice).

¹ EFB to texture (vs. RAM) is one thing that does have a noticable effect on speed. It's also buggy, unfortunately (since 3.5); see https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-efb-to-texture-problems for details.

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(09-06-2014, 03:24 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]What is "4.x" though? Git hash? Revision number at the least?

Anything between July 28 and this Wednesday. (And I do mean anything. I wouldn't be so disgruntled if this were something that broke once and got fixed, or even something that broken and I could say "it's broken since <rev>". It has never worked acceptably.)

BTW, @RachelB, way to alienate your users...

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(09-06-2014, 05:01 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]It depends on how the developers coded things. If they didn't program their games like TLS where audio was always supplied to the DSP regardless if the GPU was at its limits, then sure, audio would get choppy. Xenoblade Chronicles drops its FPS iirc, but the audio remains constant.

It almost sounds like you're saying the 3.5 behavior was more correct?

triad Wrote:That is definitely not my experience. G6SE7D and RO7E7D I'm most familiar with and generally lucky to get 60% (with almost 50% higher CPU speed than you're claiming), and I've seen as bad as 30%-ish (especialy in the dream sequences in RO7E7D). I want to say RO8E7D is comparable. That sound dump is from RO7E7D when it's getting around 55%. This is with both 3.5 (from rpmfusion, so theoretically not a build issue on my end, except GWLE6L which doesn't run on 3.5) and 4.x (pretty much any master since July); I've yet to see any noteworthy speedup in 4.x compared to 3.5. Pre-rendered video in all of the above especially are well under 100% (55%-70% in RO7E7D, 30% or even 10% in RO8E7D).

You probably really don't have sufficient hardware. Some games are more demanding than others, what's "sufficient hardware" will change for a range of games. It might be that the Spyro games are very demanding in Dolphin (I don't own any, I can't test them myself). Your settings sound good. Test this: set your IR to 1x, disable all AA, and see if you get any slowdowns. If you do, then you have verified that you have a CPU bottleneck.

Some further advice, try other games aside from the Spyro games. Try some light-weight ones and see if you have issues running them (Brawl, Melee, Wind Waker, most any WiiWare will do it).

triad Wrote:It almost sounds like you're saying the 3.5 behavior was more correct?

Actually no. These games are coded in such a way that the CPU still has enough cycles to send audio data to the DSP at a constant rate, while on the other hand they may not always issue GPU commands in a timely fashion (hence an FPS drop on the console). In the case of real Wii hardware, the CPU is still has the necessary cycles for audio handling routines. With Dolphin, the audio sounds horrible if the emulated CPU is not running at 100%, so essentially slowdowns of Dolphin's emulated CPU represent what would happen on a Wii if the CPU were suddenly "too busy" to even process audio in time. If a real Wii's CPU is too busy (imagine a bottleneck occurring and stealing cycles), it might not be able to send audio data to the DSP at a constant rate, thus it would sound horrible similar to Dolphin. However, to my knowledge, many developers fought to avoid bottlenecking the CPU, so outside of homebrew tests, not much software for the Wii (or GC) displays this behavior. Sacrificing FPS was generally the lesser evil as opposed to sub-par audio.

So to summarize:
Actual Wii -> CPU too busy -> DSP does not receive enough data -> Audio quality may suffer
4.0 -> Emulated CPU too busy -> Emulated DSP does not receive enough data -> Audio quality may suffer
3.5 -> Emulated CPU too busy -> Emulated DSP grabs the data anyway (data is not always correct) -> Various audio issues occur, but the overall quality may be seem higher

4.0 and above are closer to how the Wii actually works. The DSP, real or emulated, needs constant and timely data or instructions on how to process audio. Any interruption of that distorts the audio.

OP disable open mp texture decoder, there were reports of it slowing down things at various cases and you can always lower your graphics enhancements. Also use the absolute latest dev build since there are speed ups being implemented constantly recently.

Are you using an amd cpu by any chance? If yes, that would explain your problems. Check out the linked google table in this thread:
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-new-dolphin-cpu-benchmark-no-game-required

As an example on how bad amd cpus are for Dolphin, take my Core 2 Duo @3.2 Ghz. It takes 17 min 49 sec on Povray, so it's about on the same level as a new 3 Ghz amd cpu. Oh, and i can't even play Wind Waker properly yet. But i won't complain with a 7 years old cpu. Also keep in mind that more than 2 cores are useless, so 10% more single thread speed is about 10% faster than 8 cores instead of 2.

If you have an i3 or better @3Ghz+ with those problems, there might be a real software issue for you. But since you are linux user, i would bet my money on gpu driver problem instead of a dolphin problem.

I would also appreciate the option back, but mainly because I want to play arc rise fantasia again on the new builds without the sound crackling error before every magic. Did not happen in old builds.