Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Full Version: Audio is choppy and audio latency doesn't go above 30
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SpiderHyphenMan

I'm trying to fix the choppy audio in my GameCube games, everywhere online says to increase the audio latency but mine won't go above 30. Any fixes for this?
Most 'choppy' audio is actually caused by the CPU not being able to keep up with emulation requirements. Increasing the audio buffer (the "audio latency" setting) only helps in very specific situations, and even then mostly when extremely marginal on CPU power. I have no idea why it seems recently popped up as a "recommendation". Increasing this too far could have negative consequences, such as the audio noticeably lagging behind the onsceen action.

From your profile specs I assume you're on a laptop. Check it's plugged in and in "high performance" power mode in windows. Also make sure that nothing else is running and using any CPU power - as mobile devices are often power and thermally limited, anything running could be using resources there which could have been allocated to dolphin.

For the most part, dolphin is single-core limited, so when checking in the windows task manager check the highest per-cpu utilization instead of any "global" value. Many mobile CPUs have limits on the energy they can use (and therefore output as heat), and may have limits on their top-end boost or throttle before the listed speed on the spec sheet, so check that you're meeting your expected boost speed (your profile says 2.11 ghz, but I assume that's wrong as that's /very/ low for even the most thermally limited device) and not hitting any temperature limits.

EDIT: Also your profile says you're using 5.0 - if that's correct, try using the latest -dev release, as there's been a large number of improvements since the 5.0 release. For the most part, more recent dev builds offer a better experience than 5.0, and calling that 'stable' is more a comment on it being a known quantity rather than any comment on it's quality.