Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

This is the only game where I am experiencing FPS drops, and I understand that this game originally runs at 60 fps, but I'm able to attain 60 FPS much of the time, but I'm experiencing annoying drops - about a five-ten times every minute.

Here are my PC specifications first.

Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.4 Ghz
Radeon R9 280x
8 GB DDR3 ram
Windows 7 64 bit
Dolphin 4.0.2 ( I have tried the latest dev versions too, but they didn't do much with performance.)

Here is a little bit of bench-marking I've tried. My main goal is to run Metroid Prime 3 at a consistent frame-rate with no drops. No matter which settings I choose I notice these drops. Even if I run it at native resolution (480p), I still notice these drops. In fact I have the best framerates when I run the game at 1080p (auto - window size) for some reason, but even then I experience drops from 60 fps to 45 fps (or lower.) I found that OpenGL works best. While the framerate is a little bit less in open spaces than DX 11, with DX 11 everytime there is an explosion I get a huge drop in framerates, down to 15 fps and there is a lag in which the shaders don't load for a few seconds. However, in OpenGL I've noticed a blur on the top portion of my visor. It comes and goes. I've tried messing with a plethora of settings. I don't think dolphin has much support for quad-core processors, so I don't think mine being a dual-core matters much. In fact, I can play games like Mario Galaxy 2 at 60 fps at 1080p 4xSSAA with drops to 55 fps every once in a while. The CPU is the only bit of my hardware that I think can be bottle-necking the game, but all other games run great.

So anyway - to summarize, the game runs at 55 fps - 60 fps and it is great when it runs at those speeds, but every few seconds I'm experiencing stuttering and drops to 45 fps - 50 fps, then speeds up again to 55 fps - 60 fps, almost periodically and especially when I enter a new area. I also am experiencing a blur when I use OpenGl, but unfortunately OpenGL is the only back-end where the game runs well with the fewest stuttering and glitches. Changing resolution doesn't do anything, in fact it can make it worse. The only thing that seemed to help was turning off AA entirely, but it was minuscule.

Is there anyway I can improve performance? Any recommended revisions of Dolphin that run the game better than 4.0.2 stable? Thanks all.

Edit: One more thing. There is almost static noise in the sound that happens every once in a while. Kind of like with the old VHS tapes when there was a portion of the film messed up. I've tried changing the settings from HLE to LLE, but that made the sound stutter.

MP3 is about one of the hardest games to emulate because of the stuttering in the prime series and can be very taxing on the CPU. You have a pretty good CPU there, in addition, Dolphin uses only two cores so quad core is useless here. The occassional drop in frames may be due to two things. 1) before entering a room the game is actually loading the next area before it opens. Or 2) If your playing for the first time it is the shader cache generating in Dolphin and there's nothing to be done here. Although OpenGL is the fastest you may want to try Ishiiruka build over on Development section and see if that helps smooth out the game as I'v heard this build does wonders in MP3.

(12-17-2014, 06:51 AM)cyrax33 Wrote: [ -> ]MP3 is about one of the hardest games to emulate because of the stuttering in the prime series and can be very taxing on the CPU. You have a pretty good CPU there, in addition, Dolphin uses only two cores so quad core is useless here. The occassional drop in frames may be due to two things. 1) before entering a room the game is actually loading the next area before it opens. Or 2) If your playing for the first time it is the shader cache generating in Dolphin and there's nothing to be done here. Although OpenGL is the fastest you may want to try Ishiiruka build over on Development section and see if that helps smooth out the game as I'v heard this build does wonders in MP3.

Thanks a lot for the advice. Yeah, it's my first time playing the game on dolphin (I have a Wii, but wanted to replay the game in 720p or 1080p to get rid of jaggies on my HDTV.) I wouldn't mind a somewhat slower framerate (say 50fps), but the huge spikes and drops make the game less than desirable to play, and I'd rather just play it on the Wii with jaggies. I'll try the Ishiiruka build and see how it runs. Thanks a lot!

Since its your first time if you go a second round at it it should diminish as the shaders should be stored. Also I forgot to mention, make sure you enable Full Async Shader Compilation when using Ishiiruka build.

Yes try ishiiruka latest this build reduces sttutering a lot in mp3 or trilogy 

Thanks guys for recommending Ishiiruka. It has made the game definitely bearable after I tweaked with settings. I get a solid 60 fps in corridors and drops in large areas only, and they happen less frequently. The only thing that is bad about Ishiiruka is that the sound crackling has increased immensely, and even if I choose the Time Stretching option, it is very noticeable. I'm sure I can find a fix for that as well.