I played a couple of separate sessions of a few minutes, and changed the log to "Info".
The following message was produced as the last entry of each play session, matching what you described, but only once per session.
45:48:896 Core\PowerPC\Jit64\Jit.cpp:739 W[PowerPC]: flushing main code cache, please report if this happens a lot
For Metroid that's actually pretty normal IIRC.
Thanks. I tried so many things yesterday that I'm ready to give up.
Something interesting I found by keeping the performance window in task manager open, is that during the long pauses in emulation, GPU and CPU load went to zero while hard drive access spiked to 100%. However, during the normal stutter events, disk access remained at zero %. My dolphin user folder has been on an SSD throughout all this, with only the game image in a mechanical hard drive. I tried moving the game itself to the SSD as well, but the stutter remained. I do not recall if I had the long pauses while playing off the SSD.
I also had the long pauses while playing Mario Kart Wii, which had never given me this type of issues with my current or previous hardware, so something must have changed recently. There may be some disk access issues here, besides shader compilation or other type of stutter. It may just be an unfortunate combination of hardware, drivers, installed software, etc. I'll have to tolerate it until my next upgrade.
The jit stutters look like this
https://youtu.be/5ZyGGbFH644
Windows shutting off the hard drive when not used isn't surprising, but I don't think it shuts off the ssd. Does it still go to 100% disk usage on the ssd? Maybe your antivirus is doing something?
(01-11-2020, 02:15 AM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]The jit stutters look like this https://youtu.be/5ZyGGbFH644
Windows shutting off the hard drive when not used isn't surprising, but I don't think it shuts off the ssd. Does it still go to 100% disk usage on the ssd? Maybe your antivirus is doing something?
Thanks a lot for posting that video. I do get quite a bit of those stutters.
I get three types:
1. Just like the one in your video
2. Shorter ones, where the stutter is more heard than seen
3. Long ones of >1sec, where the CPU and GPU drop to zero and the hard drive shoots up to 100%
I tested some more and #3 doesn't seem to happen with the SSD. The really small ones as in #2, always happen in the exact same places. If I open the same save file over and over, I can hear a micro-stutter in the same exact portion of Samus' ship's animation, very predictably. This one is unlikely to be shader cache because that shader would have been compiled the first time that scene loaded. As for #1, I wished it had not been so bad while I was building my shader cache initially, but now that I have over 12,000, it is not happening so often.
I would at least like to resolve #3 without having to buy a new large SSD, since that is the most objectionable type of stutter I get. There must be some system setting or issue causing this. I have the drive set to sleep after 30 min and these long pauses happen sometimes within less than a minute of each other, so it is probably not that.
I suspect I have several issues at once.
(01-11-2020, 11:17 AM)themanuel Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks a lot for posting that video. I do get quite a bit of those stutters.
I get three types:
1. Just like the one in your video
2. Shorter ones, where the stutter is more heard than seen
3. Long ones of >1sec, where the CPU and GPU drop to zero and the hard drive shoots up to 100%
I tested some more and #3 doesn't seem to happen with the SSD. The really small ones as in #2, always happen in the exact same places. If I open the same save file over and over, I can hear a micro-stutter in the same exact portion of Samus' ship's animation, very predictably. This one is unlikely to be shader cache because that shader would have been compiled the first time that scene loaded. As for #1, I wished it had not been so bad while I was building my shader cache initially, but now that I have over 12,000, it is not happening so often.
I would at least like to resolve #3 without having to buy a new large SSD, since that is the most objectionable type of stutter I get. There must be some system setting or issue causing this. I have the drive set to sleep after 30 min and these long pauses happen sometimes within less than a minute of each other, so it is probably not that.
I suspect I have several issues at once.
There isn't much you can do with 1, except maybe disabling MMU and hoping there are less and/or shorter stutters.
2 might just be that prime is not an easy game to run.
A 6700k averages 56 vps at some area in mp1. An abnormally slow bit of the game could probably stutter on a lot of processors. You can actually see my speed percentage in my video drop a few times.
Hard drive turning off after a while is in the windows power plan advanced settings. Set it to never or a longer amount of time.
(01-12-2020, 01:20 AM)Craftyawesome Wrote: [ -> ]There isn't much you can do with 1, except maybe disabling MMU and hoping there are less and/or shorter stutters.
2 might just be that prime is not an easy game to run. A 6700k averages 56 vps at some area in mp1. An abnormally slow bit of the game could probably stutter on a lot of processors. You can actually see my speed percentage in my video drop a few times.
Hard drive turning off after a while is in the windows power plan advanced settings. Set it to never or a longer amount of time.
I’ll try when I’m back home but I imagine it would not go to sleep immediately after one of those pauses, because they happen within minutes of each other. Then again, Windows operates in mysterious ways.
I’ll move that game to the SSD for now.
I'll make one more update here, for future reference.
1. Moderate stutters that seem to track well with this log message:
"Core\PowerPC\Jit64\Jit.cpp:739 W[PowerPC]: flushing main code cache, please report if this happens a lot"
I presume these happen to most people on this game but I can't verify. While annoying, they don't happen often enough to be a bid deal.
2. Short stutters on the audio but you don't really see the interruption visually.
I have no clue what these are and they seem to occur on specific, repeatable places in the emulation, e.g., animation of Samus' ship while saving. These are pretty common and nagging, but tolerable.
3. Long ones of 1 second or more, where the CPU and GPU drop to zero and the hard drive shoots up to 100%
I have mostly narrowed this down to the specific hard drive from which I run the disc images. I moved the game to a third hard drive I have, also magnetic, but actually slower speed at 5,400rpm (from a laptop) and it seems not to suffer from those freezes. I have to test more but it definitely seems much better. If that is the case, then the solution is simple.