Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

System Specs:

i5-4690k @ 4.3GHz
8GB RAM
500GB 850 Evo SSD for /
2TB WD Blue HDD for /home
R9 Fury
Debian Testing (fully updated)
Dolphin 5.0-1103 (built from Git)

I have been noticing an odd problem with Dolphin recently: The longer that X11 has been running, the worse the performance in Dolphin is. For example, this morning:

I restarted my computer at around 10AM. Dolphin played New Super Mario Bros Wii at 4k60 solid.
Tried to play more just now (~3:30 PM) and noticed that Dolphin was struggling to hit 4k @ 58FPS, despite my GPU and CPU both not being under much load

If I leave X running for a few days, Dolphin will slowly get worse and worse. I have seen it as bad as 17FPS.

The strange thing is that nothing really changes the performance. No options being changed (graphical, Wii CPU overclock) change the performance by any amount, unless they overwhelm my system normally at which point Dolphin slows down even more.

The slowdown occurs with both an emulated Wiimote, a real Wiimote, and run through Steam (for Steam Controller compatibility) or just executed from a terminal.

I'm at a loss here, no other application has this problem. All other games (Steam or otherwise) appear to maintain their normal FPS days after I last restarted X11.

The only fix I have found so far is to restart X11 every 6 hours or so (or whenever I want to play a game with Dolphin), but that is not a practical solution.

Possibly thermal throttling. Have you checked your temperatures and dmesg log?

Edit: even with thermal throttling, it shouldn't become permanently that slow (17FPS) until you restart the X server. I suspect it may be a driver issue.

It isn't thermal throttling. I have a widget that I use to monitor temps of all 4 cores, GPU, and storage device temps. None of them were over 55c.

If it was a driver issue, I would expect other applications (Citra, Steam games) to be effected as well, but none of them are.

(10-18-2016, 04:25 AM)goofybud16 Wrote: [ -> ]It isn't thermal throttling. I have a widget that I use to monitor temps of all 4 cores, GPU, and storage device temps. None of them were over 55c.

If it was a driver issue, I would expect other applications (Citra, Steam games) to be effected as well, but none of them are.

Im having the same type of issue!  If i use dolphin 5 official it does not occur, any dev build including the newest one which at time of post was 20 hours ago, I can play any game but in this case Super Mario Sunshine for a little over an hour.  Then it will slowly start stuttering and frame drops and audio crackle till it becomes unplayable.  I must save, stop emulator and reopen then it will be fine again for another hour or so then repeat the same thing.  Also using Core i5 6600 GTX 1050ti @720 8GB Memory and all power settings set to high performance...OpenGL Backend and xaudio.  The crutch is that the newest builds of Dolphin seem significantly faster for shader cache as well as graphical glitches fixed in some of the games I play.  I can stay with 5.0 official for now, but I really want to run one of these better builds.  Id be happy to help in anyway to get this resolved.

Please see our rules about necroposting:

Quote:Necroposting: Do not revive a discussion older than 6 months unless your post adds something meaningful or otherwise contributes to the thread. Please create a new thread about your subject instead. Threads violating this rule will be closed. Stickied threads, Game Discussion threads, and HD Texture threads are exempt, however, and users can freely post there regardless of how old the topics are.

It would be better to make a new thread in this case rather than reviving someone else's.