Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello, so I have a wierd issue with my Dolphin. I'm trying to play Dolpin 5.0-321 Project M. The issue has happened on every single Dolphin version I've attempted to use over the last year or so. The strange thing is this - Whenever I jump to a new version of dolphin, I am without error for a couple of days. But progressively it gets worse. The issue arises when loading Netplay on Dolphin, in the first moment when its trying to boot up, the RAM usage spikes massively, slowly rising to almost my entire RAM capacity. The first days I have no issues loading, it happens insttantly with my friends and I see no RAM spikes.

Then after a few days of playing, it becomes worse and worse. The boot up from 'black screen' becomes slower and slower, until eventually I often crash on boot-up. The wierd part here is; RAM usage spikes massively but it also crashes my entire internet. So I get disconnected from Skype at the same time, and can't do anything. I get stuck in a lag phase basically, where I can do nothing. I don't understand why my internet dies at the same time, and I don't understand why booting up a fresh dolpin version with the PM set-up somehow resets this issue for a while.

Any solutions?
My friends see this error when I vanish from the netplay lobby

Line: 427
File: HW\EXI_DeviceIPL.cpp

Does this happen when not using netplay? Does this happen in all graphics backends? Does deleting the shader cache solve the problem temporarily, like switching versions? (The shader cache is the folder Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Cache\Shaders\.)

I have heard of the line 427 EXI_DeviceIPL.cpp error before, but I've always been wondering how that error could be possible. Thank you for telling us that it happens when you vanish from the netplay lobby – that gives me some ideas on how to figure out what's wrong. This is unlikely to be related to your main problem, though.

Hey there. So.. The problem occurs both in netplay and offline. Deleting the cache did not help.

But switching graphics backend did. We are using OpenGL because that's the recommended setting for Project M and netplay, but I just tried switching to Direct3D 11 and it loaded instantly.. So maybe a problem with OpenGL? Is there a solution to this or? I don't know if there's a benefit to using OpenGL since the netplay PM recommends that, but well! Since smashladder and stuff requires OpenGL that would be optimal to solve that. One step of the way at least with this solution!

I can't think of any reason that OpenGL would be better, except that you avoid the bug where starting Wii games with Direct3D 11 in fullscreen when Render to Main Window is disabled will make Dolphin lock up. (You might get better performance in OpenGL, but that's not true for people with AMD GPUs, so that can't be a reason to recommend it for anyone.)