Emulator

Try enabling fast-disc-speed, and possibly bisecting again.

Extra info: If I disable the frame limit I can consistently run the game at 200%+ speed, so there's not a lack of power. The stutters will still occur even with the frame limiter disabled, though Dolphin will not report that the game is going below 100%. Instead it will go from like 210% to something like 190%.

If I have the frame limiter on, then it does show a drop to 90% or so. But again, when the frame limiter is disabled, it's way beyond fullspeed all of the time yet it still stutters.

@JMC4789 on it!

Just chiming in to say that fast disc speed has no effect on this.

The game itself is lagging most likely... we'd need to check and see if this happens on console.

I'm fairly certain it does not happen on console, but if you really want I can bust out my copy of Trilogy to be sure.

Fast disc speed has no effect.

I did a bisect again and got the same result. However, I decided to try the previous version to 5.0-5748, which is 5.0-5745, and it had the stutters too. After that I decided to try the previous version to that one, 5-0-5743, and behold! this one doesn't stutter.

Time for two more videos then.
5.0-5743 (no stutters): https://youtu.be/106UtGJ1EII
5.0-5745 (stutters): https://youtu.be/CSA7Ja48MKI

There may be frame drops on console when changing rooms (I don't really remember) but I am completely sure it never straight up stutters with even the sound stopping :(

What I'd suggest is checking on console for sure and rechecking the bisect. I'm like ~90% sure there was some report about this being related to disc timings... but that doesn't guarantee fast disc speed to fix it anyway.

Just to clarify: The bisect gave me the same result, but I decided to manually check the builds and quickly found the (apparent) culprit

Try turning on GPU Texture Decoding out of curiosity.

Wow, what the hell?

GPU texture decoding actually solves the issue on both OpenGL and Vulkan (the option doesn't exist in D3D11)

Wow.

But this doesn't happen on 5743 even without GPU texture decoding

I've been playing for a while and it's fine now with GPU texture decoding, except for one LONG stutter I had after defeating a boss but I guess that's because Nvidia doesn't like Ubershaders on Vulkan/OpenGL very much? Or did that get fixed?

In any case, shouldn't the wiki be updated to recommend users to turn on GPU texture decoding in order to avoid this issue?

Long freezes are actually caused by JIT cache flushing, which is an entirely different problem.

Turning on GPU texture decoding won't be recommended on the wiki, as that's not actually a real fix. The real problem is arbitrary mipmap detection being too slow, and GPU texture decoding just masks the problem because it doesn't support that feature (notice the mipmapped textures become higher quality when you turn it on, if your IR is >1x). The proper fix is to make the detection faster, which would probably best be achieved by moving the detection into a compute shader to let the GPU do the dirty work, since it's much faster at processing texels than a CPU. There may be CPU<->GPU latency issues, but testing will have to be done to determine that.

JonnyH has crafted up a significant improvement for this issue: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/7170

For future reference, turning on fast disc speed can only make problems like these worse. It's not something I would recommend to have enabled when testing.

I enabled it to see if anything changed then disabled it again for the rest of the testing

So then, 5.0-5745 being the build that made this happen makes sense since it introduced resolution independent mipmaps, right? (and it doesn't happen with GPU texture decoding which doesn't support this specific feature)

I don't know why the bisect tool points me to 5.0-5748, but whatever, my manual testing immediately led me to 5745

I think this is the same issue reported in #10680 https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/10680

Yep, seems like it's the same problem

#10680 has been fixed, you may check if this one is fixed as well...