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Full Version: Abnormal Lag in F-Zero Sand Ocean tracks
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Hi forum,

Having a small problem here, nothing game breaking but still annoying.

When playing F-Zero GX I get abnormal lags in 2 certain tracks, specificaly these are the 2 Sand Ocean tracks that the game offers. In both tracks I encounter abnormal lags while the rest of the game runs smoothly. I can get between 120 and 300fps with turbomodus on any other racing track except the Sand Oceans tracks.

Also for comparison: About a year ago I had an older, much weaker gaming rig. Back then my PC had no problem with Sand Ocean tracks, as they are not as demanding as for example the Casino or Mute City tracks of this game. Yet somehow, despite more power, even when using the OLD dolphin settings of my old gaming rig which ran this track with no problems, I get lag Huh

This started about 8 months ago, Didn´t have the problem initialy after installing Windows 10 with this new system. I suspect this came with an Radeon driver update but I may be wrong here. Other then that, so far any AMD update for my GPU would seem to affect this issue slightly, for better or sometimes also worse... But there seems to be an effect here. Some GPU updates made the problem slightly better, others like my last GPU update would have seemingly made it worse again. The effect however is slight, we are talking about 20% more or less fps at best with the driver update.


I of course also tried playing around with a few settings, what seems to effect it the most, actualy exclusively, is the MSAA setting. In fact, as soon as I only put MSAA to 2x I already(which was also the setting I used in my old rig) get slight lag, which only worsens the higher I set MSAA. Medium heavy lags at 4x and 8x is just a pure lagfest. So far I run all games with at least 120fps at 4X MSAA, except this race track though. So whatever causes the issue it seems to be tied to how Dolphin handles MSAA for this specific track in the game and likely to my GPU driver.

For reference: I can also run any other game, including any other F-Zero racing track at 8x MSAA without any lags or problems once again. Again, this problems affects this specific racing track only.

Also as said, I ran the game in my old settings before the PC upgrade, and yet with a CPU and GPU several times as powerfull I am getting lag and bad fps in the same racing track even with the same old settings Sad

Something isn´t right here. Any suggestions or tips?

At the moment I have no other clues or information to add... Except my specs:

Windows 10 pro 64bit version 1809
Intel Core I7 8700k
Saphire Nitro RX 470
G.Skill Trident Z RGB 3200 Cl14 2x16GB GTZR(Intel) version

I can add dumps or other Dolphin reports if requested.

Oh and also: 2 more things I tried or did the past months. 1: I tried overclocking my GPU, if there is a difference then it is minimal... Despite overclocking of the GPU I still run into the same lag problems as with no overclock. 2: I updated my Dolphin version from 4.0 to 5.0 as well recently. So far 5.0 works fine no complaints here, however, the abnormal lagging of the Sand Ocean tracks still persists. I had hoped that an update to a new Dolphin version might fix this issue, but no.

Other then that, as my post implies, my overall settings are the same as on my old PC. The only difference is that I upped MSAA from 2x to 4x, and internal resolution from 2,5x native to a full 4x native. All other settings are identical to the settings I had on my old PC. And as said, even if I turn MSAA down to 2x again, I still get lag.

Help or having this eventualy fixed is highly appreciated.
Please try the latest development version of Dolphin. If it still doesn't run well with that version, enable "Skip EFB Access from CPU" to get a significant speedup on Sand Ocean in exchange for breaking the heat haze effect.
(11-19-2019, 10:13 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]Please try the latest development version of Dolphin. If it still doesn't run well with that version, enable "Skip EFB Access from CPU" to get a significant speedup on Sand Ocean in exchange for breaking the heat haze effect.

Skipping EFB Access from CPU does the trick, but also indeed disables the haze effects.


After some experimenting with the development version, I got it to run, albeit slightly buggy but enough for testing purposes.

It works with the development version! Despite "Skip EFB Access from CPU" disabled it runs without lag, and the haze effect in the distance works fine too.

As it stands I might keep this developers version for now... If I can get it to run properly. The developers version seems to be doing something in the background in intervals leading to sudden, short and heavy fps drops in all scenarios of the game.

Anyway, whatever the developers version does, it works and has this bug fixed, at least for my system that is.