Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello I'm currently having the crackling issue using Dolphin 5.0 on my computer. Sound emulation is perfectly fine in 3.0 but i want to use the latest version with my dolphin bar. (I also put a combined 6-8 hours no probably into various games just ignoring the stuttering.)

My PC has a AMD ryzen 1600 3.49Ghz CPU and a nvidia 1060 3GB GPU on windows 10.


Using 5.0 system check clocks the dolphin at using 20% cpu power with plenty to spare. I can run games stable and fast at 200% speed with maxed out stable play and graphics at 120FPS(yes I know this is pretty GPU dependant) I've read as many guides as I could find. I've tried all three of the audio options on both of the engines (XAudio and Open AL). Setting to Open AL and changing the latency doesn't do anything but introduce more or less lag to the sound. Using time stretching reduces the crackle but introduces more stuttering and sound repeat and a little over a second of audio lag.

Using ish and the old D audio system works the best but it still has noticeable crackles and drops every few seconds.


Any advice on figuring this out would be appreciated.

Any recent guides or secret tips.



Here is a link to some audio samples from Super Mario Galaxy and No More Heros. both samples were taken at a stable 60FPS the first with Dolphin and the second with ishiiruka.
https://soundcloud.com/namt93/dolphin-sound-samples

Cracking effectively happens if the emulator can't keep up - it finishes playing one audio buffer before the next is ready, causing a tiny gap that sounds awful.

Try the latest dev version - there's been a number of fixes, including performance improvements for ryzen specifically.

Ensure you're using ubershaders to ensure shader compiler stuttering isn't causing issues. I believe the Nvidia driver still has some issues with this on opengl and vulkan, so try with the dx11 video backrnd.

And the system load in Windows takes into account all CPU cores, so you can never get 100% unless you scale perfectly. Which dolphin doesn't. It uses at most 2 cores, and then not evenly split load, so 20% of 6 cores may well actually mean it's CPU limited in places

So using the newest dev build of 5.0 doesn't seem to make much of an impact, but I did get a moderate improvement by not using dual core.

dolphin 3.0 the sound is perfect with both dsound and xaudio at the 48000Hz sampling. Is there a succinct change log somewhere. I think I'm going to try going version by version to isolate when sound will break for my computer.

Can you show some screenshots of your configuration. I think I know what's going on... Particularly the main configuration page.

I went back to try it again and realized after I downloaded the latest version I launched my older version. With the new version on X audio and audio stretching at about 138ms it's eliminating the doubling and stuttering/popping in most games without the lag. I'm still having trouble with super mario galaxy 2 which even at maximum sound stretch has pops every few seconds. It's seems to me that DSP LLE performs better than DSP HLE. and 3.0 is still definitely the best audio wise.


Settings dump


I can make video dumps and audio dumps at any setting for analysis.

Try disabling cheats - they have known issues on the latest -dev builds with causing stutter (though 5.0 should be ok?)

And any chance you could post the video settings too? And the audio settings?

Actually, it may be worth trying setting everything to the defaults to see if there is some setting hiding somewhere (you can extract a new -dev build somewhere, and create an empty file called "portable.txt" next to the .exe, and it should use a new local directory for the settings instead of touching the user-global settings)

Well, this is embarrassing...

I just restarted my system because of a windows update and now everything is working perfectly.

It is perfect on DSP HLE and near perfect on DSP LLE recompiler with stutters only during scene transitions with stretch disabled.


Sooooooo.... who knows, thanks for the help everyone.