Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi all
Now the thing is, im fairly certain my hardware is capable of dolphin, it works just fine with PCSX2 on turbo

Now heres the issue

It's quite laggy and stuttery at the start for some games like project M

it then smooths out to a nice 60fps again

after i while it starts getting choppy, however if i click escape, then click no to ending the emulation it instantly goes back to a smooth 60fps

does anyone know what the problem is or how to solve it?

You should upgrade to the latest dev builds, they´re a lot faster than 4.0.2: https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

EDIT: Your PC is indeed capable of running Dolphin at full speed, but don´t compare two completely different emulators that emulate two completely different consoles; it´s a really bad assumption.

(03-27-2016, 02:41 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: [ -> ]You should upgrade to the latest dev builds, they´re a lot faster than 4.0.2: https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

EDIT: Your PC is indeed capable of running Dolphin at full speed, but don´t compare two completely different emulators that emulate two completely different consoles; it´s a really bad assumption.

Thanks a lot, ill try it out
And yeah I guess thats fair enough

Okay so I've updated to the most recent version
Whilst this is a massive improvement, and the graphics are improved, theres still an issue
Everynow and again theres lag spikes, but they dont correspond to spikes in GPU usage or on any of the 8 threads on my CPU, each one never really exceeds 50%
any ideas?

You're probably getting shader compilation stuttering, which you can't avoid currently. It will be much less of an issue and you won't get those as often if you continue to play the game.

And yes, Dolphin will never use more than 50% of your CPU, because it uses at most 3 cores (one for the emulated CPU, one for the GPU, and maybe one for the DSP and other threads which are not really intensive).

the DSP thread doesn't need that much.

Yeah, that's why I said "maybe". Even with LLE it rarely uses more than 50%...

Okay I think I've worked it out
It's probably one of the two
A) RAM aint fast enough - highly doubt it but dont know anyway to monitor RAM bandwidth usage so cant tell

B) Dolphin generates shaders first time needed then caches them - this makes more sense as when i play as a new character the lag spikes are horrible, but if i play the same match again there arent any. I dont know how Dolphin works though so this may not be the case

The RAM is probably not what is limiting you. IIRC, there are even some benchmarks out there that prove that RAM speed is not going to affect Dolphin's emulation speed a lot (or at all).

The stuttering is because Dolphin has to compile shaders, and the GPU drivers do that slowly (this is a noticeable issue because Dolphin doesn't work like PC games, and has to generate and compile shaders on-the-fly to emulate the GC/Wii GPU which doesn't use shaders). And yes, Dolphin will cache them after they're compiled, so stuttering will be reduced as you continue to play the game.

Awesome, glad to hear thats how it works
Well glad to now it will get less and less prominent