Having some trouble with emulating Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. According to the wiki it runs flawlessly, but the moment I move into the basement in the Elfsong Tavern my framerate drops from 60 down to 30 if I'm running above native resolution, 45-48 if I'm at native. And this game seemingly has no frameskipping(likely because it runs flawlessly on original hardware across all platforms), so even these relatively minor drops reduce speed significantly and make the game unplayable, at least by my standards. Anyone got any ideas to get this running correctly?
Here are a couple things to check:
1. Do you have Windows Power management set to High Performance?
2. Do you have a profile set up for Dolphin in the Nvidia Control Panel with the Power Options set to Prefer Maximum performance?
3. Do you have the latest GPU drivers installed?
4. Is Windows up to date?
5. What Graphics backend are you running in Dolphin: OpenGL, D3D, or Vulkan?
6. Are you running Dolphin at native resolution, or have you turned up the Internal Resolution?
7. Are you running any cheats in Dophin? (as in, does turning off cheats help)
8. Have you prayed to the PC gods for more FPS?
(07-29-2018, 01:43 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Here are a couple things to check:
1. Do you have Windows Power management set to High Performance?
2. Do you have a profile set up for Dolphin in the Nvidia Control Panel with the Power Options set to Prefer Maximum performance?
3. Do you have the latest GPU drivers installed?
4. Is Windows up to date?
5. What Graphics backend are you running in Dolphin: OpenGL, D3D, or Vulkan?
6. Are you running Dolphin at native resolution, or have you turned up the Internal Resolution?
7. Are you running any cheats in Dophin? (as in, does turning off cheats help)
8. Have you prayed to the PC gods for more FPS?
1.Yep
2.No specific profile, that's just my global setting.
3.Yep.
4.I don't know how to stop it from staying up to date at this point.
5.Tried all three, results are consistent.
6.As mentioned in the OP, I've tried it both ways. Native resolution helps a bit, but not much.
7.Initially tried with widescreen cheat enabled, disabling resulted in minimal gains.
8.Such prayers are constant.
An additional note, I tried messing with the emulated CPU clock speed. Paradoxically, increasing the clock speed reduces framerate, and reducing it increases framerate, although there's a limit to how much I can increase it before it drops again, and it's still not completely stable.
EDIT: Actually I was wrong about the power settings. I remembered changing those, but I guess they got changed back. Both Windows and NVIDIA Control Panel power management settings are set for high performance, and this has a significant impact on framerate, however it's still not as stable as it should be.
No, thats normal.
You emulate a faster CPU, thats harder on your system
Emulating a slower CPU is easier.
What are your CPU's utilization, clock speed, and temps while playing the part where it drops? If lowering the emulated clocks is helping framerate it sounds like CPU performance is causing the slowdown.
(07-29-2018, 02:32 AM)asmcint Wrote: [ -> ]An additional note, I tried messing with the emulated CPU clock speed. Paradoxically, increasing the clock speed reduces framerate, and reducing it increases framerate, although there's a limit to how much I can increase it before it drops again, and it's still not completely stable.
Also it is not a paradox lowering the emulated clock speed makes the emulator easier on your system (hence increased framerates).... this is as long as the emulated speed is still fast enough for the game. (Basically this will increase performance on games that didn't have slowdowns on the GC or Wii) Increasing the emulated clock speed can improve framerates of games that had framerate issues due to hardware limitations of the GC or Wii at the cost of being more resource hungry to emulate. So what happened makes sense
(07-29-2018, 03:09 AM)TKSilver Wrote: [ -> ]What are your CPU's utilization, clock speed, and temps while playing the part where it drops? If lowering the emulated clocks is helping framerate it sounds like CPU performance is causing the slowdown.
Also it is not a paradox lowering the emulated clock speed makes the emulator easier on your system (hence increased framerates).... this is as long as the emulated speed is still fast enough for the game. (Basically this will increase performance on games that didn't have slowdowns on the GC or Wii) Increasing the emulated clock speed can improve framerates of games that had framerate issues due to hardware limitations of the GC or Wii at the cost of being more resource hungry to emulate. So what happened makes sense
CPU temp tops out about 48 Celsius, which is about average for when it's under load. Core utilization tops out around 58% per core. Still plenty of horsepower to go there. On the flipside, my GPU is barely being used at all. And that's on normal emulated clock speed, mind.