I know that in order for Agent Under Fire to even work in netplay, you have to disable dual core or else the game crashes after the opening movie. And while my CPU isn't that great, I can run splitscreen locally at 60 fps in single core mode just fine. However when I try playing in netplay, the game starts out running at 60 fps until we get to the menu screen where it drops to 20 fps and stays at that speed. And this still happens when I open 2 Dolphins on my PC and connect them to each other, so I know it's not our connections.
This happens on every version of Dolphin I've tried and no other game I've tried playing in netplay behaves this way. Is it even possible to play this game at fullspeed in netplay? I can't find any videos or threads of anyone playing it in netplay.
Try increasing the pad buffer?
I tried increasing the pad buffer all the way to 200 but the game still only runs at half speed.
So it's running at 20 FPS - 50% speed?
Netplay is more demanding than offline due to having to synchronize various things. It shouldn't be that much more demanding, I'm guessing there's some other setting getting synced that's messing with things.
I meant turning up the pad buffer does increase the framerate to 30 fps but that's still only half-speed and not a stable 30 either.
As JMC47 stated, using netplay is more demanding. Your AMD CPU, with only a STR of 1,407, may not be up to the task. That CPU isn't the greatest for running the more demanding games on Dolphin. And taxes it even more when using netplay. You can try the suggestions, but ultimately it could just be due to a weak CPU
This is the only game I've tried where the framerate drops significantly in netplay. Even Star Wars Rebel Strike runs better than Agent Under Fire at 30-40 fps when I attempt to do netplay with dual core disabled.
I believe that game uses EFB Access to CPU, which causes the GPU to stall during syncs. That could be a real pain during netplay. You could try overriding the settings to see if that helps.
I already had Skip EFB Access to CPU turned on. I checked the game's INI and the only graphics setting that it overrides is my XFB setting. I tried overriding that and still got the same results just with slightly glitchy intro movies. I also copy-pasted this into INI file and it made no difference:
[Video_Hacks]
EFBAccessEnable = False