Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Decided it was time for a replay of Metroid Prime Trilogy, and couldn't figure out why I was getting only 40 FPS. If I hit TAB to disable frame limiter it would go to 80-90 at 1440p during game play.

Turns out that the 2020 Radeon drivers were set to 40 FPS min in the Radeon Chill setting, and something between Dolphin and the driver were interpreting that to make the game run at minimum rate. After spending over a day clicking and unclicking all the advanced graphics options, and trying all the different GFX backends, all I needed was a simple change in the driver software. Hope this helps anyone that was as frustrated as I was with this.
*Edit- game was locked in at 60 fps after disabling chill in the Radeon overlay. Didn't even need to restart the game or the emulator.

(02-13-2020, 02:14 AM)Emayekayee Wrote: [ -> ]and something between Dolphin and the driver were interpreting that to make the game run at minimum rate.

The reason this happens is because:

1. Dolphin can't run the game logic faster than it can render the frames
2. If v-sync is enabled, Dolphin can't continue with the next frame until the previous one has been shown on the screen

The reason why this didn't happen when holding Tab is because v-sync gets temporarily disabled when you do that.

That is possible, but I have a 144hz monitor and max FPS in Radeon chill was set to 144. For whatever reason, it choose to run at minimum fps instead of something reasonable between min and max.

(02-13-2020, 04:51 AM)Emayekayee Wrote: [ -> ]That is possible, but I have a 144hz monitor and max FPS in Radeon chill was set to 144. For whatever reason, it choose to run at minimum fps instead of something reasonable between min and max.

Ah, I see, I didn't realize that it was a range. I'm not sure why it stuck to the minimum then.

IIRC chill tries to hook into the input to detect action, slowing the frame pacing if it doesn't detect any assuming you're idle (and less likely to notice slower FPS as there's no input lag or large motion to care about - which is useful on TDP/power limited systems)

Presumably something in the way dolphin handles input bypasses that.

But enabling *any* external frame pacing on dolphin (or other emulators , which have to lockstep emulation and frame output) is a bad idea, as it can't do dynamic frame times like a "good" PC game will.

Chill used to require either explicit support from the game, or explicit support for the game from AMD (it might have been specifically just one of these, or first one and then the other - I don't remember). If it now affects everything, that's new behaviour. I don't think AMD want it enabled when it breaks things, so if someone told their driver team that it's breaking things, they'd probably blacklist Dolphin.