My PC runs all my GC games impeccably and I rarely have any issues. However, when I play Wii games there's often stuttering as the game is loading new textures into memory. I realise that this issue is lessened the more one plays a game but it's really tedious playing something like Mario Kart Wii which skips during every race for the first lap or so.
I've got 8 gig just now. Would upping it to 16 help or is the bottleneck on the emulator side?
Are you talking about textures (custom I would imagine) or shader cache?
Upgrading your RAM will only improve the performance if the problem is with custom textures and you currently don't have enough RAM to prefetch all textures. Non-custom textures don't cause this kind of stuttering.
Also, please note that more RAM won't help with shader compilation. You said that "I realise that this issue is lessened the more one plays a game", which sounds a lot more like shader compilation than custom texture loading.
Yeah, sorry for the use of the wrong terminology. It's the shader compilation that's my bugbear. I never use custom textures.
So, basically, it's just the price of emulation then? Is it something that will improve in time or is it just something one has to live with?
Just curious.
This should be less of a problem when/if the ubershader PR gets done in the future. Alternatively, you can try Ishiiruka's async shader compilation option if you don't mind having briefly missing graphics instead of stuttering.