So I am fairly new in the realm of emulation and I already had a decent ammount of GC/ Wii games at my disposal. I have recently built my PC and I am fairly new to the technical parts of that too. I have attempted to try and get one game in particular running, Metroid Prime 1 (though I haven't tried any others at the settings I have) and I have found that even at the beginning of the game I was getting a ton of frame loss and the audio was stuttering terribly.
I have tried lowering the settings to a reasonable standard and even turned off all the graphical upgrades that I thought were causing the issue and was still having issues. I am completely stumped and I REALLY would like to be able to enjoy my games as fast as I can but I've hit a brick wall and I need help.
PC specs:
CPU- AMD FX-8350
GPU- XFX R7 250
RAM- Corsair 8GB DDR3
If you have any advice or suggestions please don't hesitate to tell me.
First off, you need to understand that AMD CPUs have low single-core speeds compared to Intel CPUs. Metroid Prime is one of the most demanding games. You probably can't reach fullspeed, but you can probably get close.
Use the latest dev builds from here
https://dolphin-emu.org/download/ It's faster than the stable builds.
If that doesn't help enough, overclock your CPU. Its free performance
Metroid Prime is a fairly demanding game. In addition, you're using an outdated Dolphin build that's incredibly slower than the latest development revisions. Although 4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2 are the stable builds, Dolphin has gotten significantly faster (~26 in the past month alone!) since 4.0. My advice: update to the
latest development builds (4.0-3151 as of this writing); it's a free speed-up.
If you encounter any further slowdowns, overclock your CPU. Dolphin relies heavily on the CPU for a large portion of its performance. The GPU determines how high you can raise things like the Internal Resolution and Anti-Aliasing without creating a GPU-based bottleneck, but everything else usually falls to the CPU. If you lower the IR and AA to their minimums and still get slowdowns, this indicates the bottleneck is CPU-based, more often than not.
While AMD CPUs are known to have lower single-threaded IPC (a metric that significantly correlates to Dolphin's performance) compared to Intel's products, the newest revisions should make Metroid Prime playable on your hardware. That wasn't always the case (as you can see using 4.0) but give the latest revisions a try, and OC in increments if necessary.
EDIT: Dammit, ninja'd because I wrote so much
(09-10-2014, 03:32 PM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]Metroid Prime is a fairly demanding game. In addition, you're using an outdated Dolphin build that's incredibly slower than the latest development revisions. Although 4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2 are the stable builds, Dolphin has gotten significantly faster (~26 in the past month alone!) since 4.0. My advice: update to the latest development builds (4.0-3151 as of this writing); it's a free speed-up.
If you encounter any further slowdowns, overclock your CPU. Dolphin relies heavily on the CPU for a large portion of its performance. The GPU determines how high you can raise things like the Internal Resolution and Anti-Aliasing without creating a GPU-based bottleneck, but everything else usually falls to the CPU. If you lower the IR and AA to their minimums and still get slowdowns, this indicates the bottleneck is CPU-based, more often than not.
While AMD CPUs are known to have lower single-threaded IPC (a metric that significantly correlates to Dolphin's performance) compared to Intel's products, the newest revisions should make Metroid Prime playable on your hardware. That wasn't always the case (as you can see using 4.0) but give the latest revisions a try, and OC in increments if necessary.
EDIT: Dammit, ninja'd because I wrote so much
Alright I'll definitely check out the new builds. I toyed around with the settings a bit more and found that for some reason running open GL seemed to speed things up. Luckily my motherboard has a pretty neat thing where I can have it automatically overclock whatever hardware it can to increase performance (X-boost I think its called) and thats already on.
Thanks for the advice! : )