Hey everyone,
I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles fine on 5.0, but wanted some nice textures so grabbed a pack to run on 5.0-8095. I've been really losing fps playing on it, despite having quite the capable GPU.
I run an i7-4720 at 2.60 GHz, 16 gb ram, and an AMD Radeon R9 M390X, and run everything on an ASUS 27 inch monitor, connected to my laptop.
Can anyone give advice on how to improve framerate, I'm running dolphin at 3x native.
Thanks
Edit:at 2x native, it runs decent, just a few framerate drops on loading screens, but gameplay is fine. This is vastly different from 3x.
Edit 2:Battling destroys fps, just roaming is fine.
Is it possible to allocate more RAM?
I'd normally suspect that your CPU is the problem. It's a good CPU for a laptop but has somewhat low clock speeds relative to what i'm used to using (a desktop i5 4670k @4ghz). But getting better speed when you crank the resolution down seems like a GPU problem instead. You certainly have enough RAM (overkill as I only have 8GB), and the VRAM on that card should (I think) also be good enough if it's 4GB.
Try using a hardware monitoring tool to see if any resources such as CPU, memory or GPU are being stressed more than others.
It has been a while since I used an AMD GPU. Prior to getting a GTX 1060, I used an old and relatively low end Radeon 7750. Despite being a desktop card, it was far older and apparently weaker than your laptop's GPU should be. I still managed to run Xenoblade at basically full speed at 2.5-3x resolution from what I can recall. So I would think you should be getting better speeds than you are now.
Try using the Vulkan or DX11 backends if you aren't doing so already. I always had issues with OpenGL on AMD GPUs due to poor driver support (there can be some bad performance problems in Cemu using AMD GPUs, and I believe PCSX2 and Citra as well).
Also, are you using the 60fps hack? Or any of the LOD hacks that expand draw distance? These all require significantly greater power than the native 30fps of the original unaltered game. I actually had to disable the draw distance hacks, they were too much for my CPU alongside 60fps, caused massive lag during stressful battles to the point where it eventually froze the emulator on the same part over and over again.
(10-15-2018, 02:41 PM)Granville Wrote: [ -> ]I'd normally suspect that your CPU is the problem. It's a good CPU for a laptop but has somewhat low clock speeds relative to what i'm used to using (a desktop i5 4670k @4ghz). But getting better speed when you crank the resolution down seems like a GPU problem instead. You certainly have enough RAM (overkill as I only have 8GB), and the VRAM on that card should (I think) also be good enough if it's 4GB.
Try using a hardware monitoring tool to see if any resources such as CPU, memory or GPU are being stressed more than others.
It has been a while since I used an AMD GPU. Prior to getting a GTX 1060, I used an old and relatively low end Radeon 7750. Despite being a desktop card, it was far older and apparently weaker than your laptop's GPU should be. I still managed to run Xenoblade at basically full speed at 2.5-3x resolution from what I can recall. So I would think you should be getting better speeds than you are now.
Try using the Vulkan or DX11 backends if you aren't doing so already. I always had issues with OpenGL on AMD GPUs due to poor driver support (there can be some bad performance problems in Cemu using AMD GPUs, and I believe PCSX2 and Citra as well).
Also, are you using the 60fps hack? Or any of the LOD hacks that expand draw distance? These all require significantly greater power than the native 30fps of the original unaltered game. I actually had to disable the draw distance hacks, they were too much for my CPU alongside 60fps, caused massive lag during stressful battles to the point where it eventually froze the emulator on the same part over and over again.
Judging off task manager, about 20% of cpu and the game uses around 2 gbs of RAM. I don't run the 60fps hack either.
I've been messing around with some settings, and 2x has been running okay, aside from frame drops on flashier enemy arts, vision, map opening and loading screens.
I'll take a look into the backends, I believe my computer already has DX1.
Thanks.
Edit:This is running an HD modpack at 2x res, which has shown to run okay, with room for improvement that I believe my PC can meet
(10-15-2018, 03:00 PM)yaboilonk Wrote: [ -> ]Judging off task manager, about 20% of cpu and the game uses around 2 gbs of RAM. I don't run the 60fps hack either.
I've been messing around with some settings, and 2x has been running okay, aside from frame drops on flashier enemy arts, vision, map opening and loading screens.
I'll take a look into the backends, I believe my computer already has DX1.
Thanks.
Edit:This is running an HD modpack at 2x res, which has shown to run okay, with room for improvement that I believe my PC can meet
The i7 4270k has 8 threads, and the windows task manager shows total cpu usage over all possible threads.
That means if you have a thread running, maxing out a single core at 100%, but otherwise idle it'll show 100/8 = 12.5% cpu utilisation. That means that pretty much any value above that /could/ be bottlenecked on that cpu thread performance - you need more detailed stats than the %age utilisation the task manager shows to say any more.
Dolphin tends to be bottlenecked on a single thread performance, but can offload some tasks to a second thread - adding that to other processes, system threads that may be spawned by the gpu driver etc. may account for it being bumped up to 20%.
But if the only change you made was the texture pack, that shouldn't really affect the cpu thread (the one that often bottlenecks performance). Perhaps you're running out of vram, and causing it to have to page stuff out of the GPU memory (then put it back the next time it's needed) - this can completely kill performance. Remember that if you're using a texture pack with .png files, those are stored *decompressed* in vram, so the size on disk isn't a good indicator of how much memory they may use.