Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So, after upgrading my computer, I've noticed microstuttering (animations occasionally look slow or choppy and sometimes they don't) in Pokemon XD and frame drops plus increased stuttering in Metroid: Trilogy.

My Settings for Pokemon XD are (All Enabled):
Direct3D 11
Enable Dual Core
DSP HLE (fast)
Cheats Off
V-Sync
Use Fullscreen
Asynchronous (Ubershaders)
Compile Shaders Before Starting
Direct3D 11
3x Native
No Anti-Aliasing
1x Anisotropic Effect
Scaled EFB Copy
Per-Pixel Lighting
Force 24-Bit Color
Disable Copy Filter
Arbitrary Mipmap Detection
Skip EFP Access from CPU
Ignore Format Changes
Store EFB Copies to Texture Only
Texture Cache all the way to Safe
GPU Decoding
Fast Depth Calculation
Disable Bounding Box
Vertex Rounding
Save Texture Cache to State
400% Clock Speed (Reduces some of the stuttering/animation glitches, but not completely)
Store XFB Copies to Texture Only
Immediately Present XFB

My Settings for Metroid: Trilogy are the same as Pokemon XD, except:
Vulkan
Store EFB Copies to Texture Only Disabled
Store XFB Copies to Texture Only Disabled
Immediately Present XFB Disabled
100% Clock Speed

Playing around with the XFB settings does nothing. A significant frame drop occurs in the final boss fight of Metroid 3: Corruption of Metroid: Trilogy whenever the Aurora Unit Head form drops a bomb on the player, emanating a wave out in all directions.

Changing Native to x1 also doesn't effect the stuttering whatsoever. Keeping clock speed normal in Pokemon XD actually hurts, not helps.

Changing to Vulkan on Pokemon XD causes more stuttering. Changing to Vulkan on Metroid: Trilogy decreases stuttering. The other graphics backends do worse than the Direct3D 11 and Vulkan, for Pokemon XD and Metroid: Trilogy, respectively.

My Laptop Specs are as follows:
300Hz Screen
Intel i7-10750H (I have the clock speed set to anywhere from 4.00 GHz to 4.50GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Design
SK Hynix DDR4-3200 (1600 MHz) 64 GB RAM
XPG GAMMIX S50 2TB RAID SSD
Computer is plugged in and No Thermal Throttling is occurring, as it sits at around 40 to 50 degrees Celsius (has liquid metal for paste).

Only Dolphin games do this, no other PC games have problems. I can run Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare at Max Settings with no issues whatsoever. The GPU Driver is updated to the latest version, so that isn't the problem either.

Ended up solving it on my own.


For Metroid: Trilogy, turning on Defer EFB Copies and Idle Skip on and setting Texture Cache to Fast fixed the frame drop problems.


For Pokemon XD: Turning on Idle Skip and alongside turning on Skip Presenting Duplicate Frames on in the XFB section fixed the stuttering and choppy animations.