Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi All,

Firstly, thanks to the devs - I have been using Dolphin for some time now and it has breathed new life into some of my older games. I really like the library functions, and was happy to discover the Mayflash sensor bar for Wii. I have other emulators, but this issue seems to be only on Dolphin and only when emulating Wii:

When run from a network drive Wii games experience micro-stutter during cut scenes, when entering a new area, and when charging the beam in Other M. I have only a small Wii library, but have tested with Other M, Mario Galaxy and Skyward Sword. Gameplay is fine until a "new" area or action occurs. Will have more details once I dump more of my game files.

Has anyone else encountered this? I have restored my settings to defaults (got the latest dev build at the same time) to no avail. PC specs are decent: I5 4670K @4.5Ghz w/ 780ti, server is older but decent HP ML150 G6, 20GB RAM, 2x 15k RAID-1, 4x4TB RAID-5. Transfers are quick to/from server (it saturates my GB NIC card) consistent 0ms ping. Read/write to server is often faster and more stable than my cheap Seagate internal drive.

I understand the I/O limitations of GB LAN - is that what is happening here? Can I make Dolphin cache the games more aggressively? How much of a game is actually loaded to RAM/vRAM? Anyone with SAN or NAS devices that can prove or refute this?

Any insights would be appreciated,

T.J.

I'm pretty sure that the issue is from you having the games on the network drive, because all your CPU and GPU shouldn't be a bottleneck. Micro-stuttering when new areas being loaded in Other M is normal for teh first time only due to making the shader cache, but the other stuttering is from the network.

Try moving at least one of the games over to the harddrive on your computer to test.

As for caching more aggressively, not possible. Dolphin pulls data from the game when requested, as the GC/Wii were made to pull data from a disk, so stuff can't be cached like that.
Not much is actually in the RAM/vRAM, as you only need 2 GB of RAM to run Dolphin.

After further testing, no stuttering whatsoever when games are stored on my SSD, but stuttering when games on server or "slow" internal HDD. Is there a know correlation between emulation speed and hard disk? Any known issues with this mayflash device? I image both my internal SATA drive and my GB LAN outperform an optical drive. SSD is relatively small, it is not desirable to use it for game images. Will test with different hardware combinations and report back.

Tweaked some things and replaced my aging Seagate data drive: confirmed- laggy only while game image is on network drive. Gamecube games lag too - this did not occur on the ancient version of Dolphin I was using until recently. Any thoughts?

Thought so
GC games lagging when using the new internal drive or network drive?

Yea, I thought so too - hence the title of my post. It seems easy to blame the network/server but it is a decent setup: Like I said, server has 3xGB LAN running a lab setup, able to fully saturate all PC NICs in my home simultaneously. v3.xx of Dolphin didn't experience this issue (can't recall exact version). Was hoping a developer would chime in with something a bit more technical.

Former Seagate drive was on it's last legs - couldn't keep up with Dolphin unless I closed everything else. But Wii has a DVD drive, no? I am most certainly getting better performance over the network, even on my wireless clients. Watching my PC stats, Dolphin doesn't even hit the HDD that hard.

You probably won't be getting any caching for network drives (it would be weird if you were) and due to sub-optimal wii ISO decryption code in Dolphin it will be repeatedly fetching the same block instead of only once.
There was a PR to fix this but it was rejected.

(11-16-2014, 05:22 AM)tueidj Wrote: [ -> ]You probably won't be getting any caching for network drives (it would be weird if you were) and due to sub-optimal wii ISO decryption code in Dolphin it will be repeatedly fetching the same block instead of only once.
There was a PR to fix this but it was rejected.

Thank you for the very informative response! I suppose I will just keep my game images on my local HDD for now. Do you expect this will work in a future release?

I would suggest making an issue report about it: https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/list

(11-25-2014, 09:34 AM)tueidj Wrote: [ -> ]I would suggest making an issue report about it: https://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/issues/list

I made an issue report some months ago (issue is still open). I got the latest 4.0-5347 today and at least one Wii game played smoothly over the network! Mario Kart Wii played fine until I went beyond 2xAA and 4xAF, (other settings: full screen resolution 1920x1080, internal resolution Auto multiple of...) at which point the framerate suffered greatly. I once again suspect the bottleneck is on the network: CPU and GPU usage both at mid 50% max during gameplay though I haven't done any exhaustive tests. Development is certainly headed in the right direction - I am a happy camper!

Just thought I would leave an update. Thanks to all the devs.