Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

With borderless fullscreen, vsync is totally smooth without any framedrops.  Exclusive fullscreen gives me framedrops from 60fps to 30fps every minute and then return to 60fps, etc., with vsync on.

This maybe because dolphin doesn't has triple buffer...

Is there anyway we can implement triple buffering so we don't keep getting framedrops in exclusive fullscreen with vsync on?

I think the real issue is that there is no vsync handled by Dolphin outside of exclusive fullscreen. So, if Aero is off you'll just get tearing even if you have vsync enabled.

No, the issue is vsync in exclusive fullscreen causes framedrops that the emulator isn't picking up. With vsync on, it would go from 60 to 30fps every minute but the sound would remain steady and the emulator still thinks it's running full speed.

JMC47 did the testing for the exclusive fullscreen feature, so he knows what he's talking about here!

This means your system can't keep the emulator running at fullspeed so vsync cuts your framerate in half since it doesn't have tripplebuffer to feed a pre-drawn frame while drawing the new one. When you use borderless fullscreen, you're by-passing vsync and letting the Windows Desktop Manager keep the game's video output in sync with your monitor's refresh rate without halving the framerate, but just repeating old frames. This avoids screen tear but causes minor stuttering that can be worse on some games than others, but is a reasonable compromise.

My description of how this works may not be perfectly accurate but the bottom line is that borderless fullscreen is a decent compromise to vsync when you can't maintain full speed but want to avoid screen tear without drastically reducing your framerate. For games on which you are able to maintain full speed, vsync will give you a smoother video output with no stuttering.

But it happens in every game, not just demanding ones. The framedrop has nothing to do with anything on screen. I could be standing still or in menu and the framerate would still drop to 30. But Dolphin thinks it's running fullspeed

I don't know what it could be, then. When you say "Dolphin thinks it's running fullspeed", do you mean that dolphin's FPS counter reports 60 FPS but you are measuring 30 FPS some other way? Since you said this affects every game, I'm assuming this happens with games that originally supported 60 FPS without cheat codes.

And why exactly you need VSync? GC/Wii games never goes above 60 FPS, so, assuming your monitor has a 60Hz refresh rate you shouldn't experience any screen tearing, even with VSync off...