Emulator

profile dolphin on all of its threads and report back the result. I'll personally let
you know where the bottleneck is.

I'm pretty new to opconfig/opreport. I have no idea which switches you'd like.

Oh, also, I recompiled with flavor=prof, and suddenly MP1 seems to run with
noticeably higher FPS rates. Weird.

1. Start the game in a build with flavor=prof, and go to a scene you want to profile.
2. Run "sudo opcontrol --reset"
3. Run "sudo opcontrol --start"
4. Wait about 20 seconds
5. Run "sudo opcontrol --stop"
6. Run "opreport -l -t .2"
7. Paste the results here.

Perhaps this should go on the Wiki somewhere.

tinctorius@grass:Linux-x86_64-prof$ opreport -l -t .1 -m tgid
CPU: AMD64 processors, speed 2210.06 MHz (estimated)
Counted CPU_CLK_UNHALTED events (Cycles outside of halt state) with a unit mask of
0x00 (No unit mask) count 100000
samples % image name app name symbol name
712638 30.8325 anon (tgid:13628 range:0x41683000-0x42783000) Dolphin
(no symbols)
522216 22.5938 libPlugin_VideoOGL.so Dolphin
TexDecoder_Decode_real(unsigned char*, unsigned char const*, int, int, int, int, int)
412063 17.8280 Dolphin Dolphin
CommandProcessor::WaitForFrameFinish()
111059 4.8050 libGLcore.so.177.82 Dolphin (no symbols)
110188 4.7673 libc-2.7.so Dolphin memcpy
89436 3.8695 anon (tgid:13628 range:0x4074a000-0x4074c000) Dolphin
(no symbols)
81950 3.5456 no-vmlinux no-vmlinux (no symbols)
33266 1.4393 Dolphin Dolphin
CommandProcessor::GatherPipeBursted()
19105 0.8266 anon (tgid:13628 range:0x40493000-0x40593000) Dolphin
(no symbols)
17820 0.7710 libmozjs.so.1d xulrunner-stub (no symbols)
15031 0.6503 libxul.so xulrunner-stub (no symbols)
9470 0.4097 libpthread-2.7.so Dolphin pthread_mutex_lock
9222 0.3990 oprofiled oprofiled (no symbols)
7497 0.3244 Dolphin Dolphin CoreTiming::Advance()
7321 0.3167 Dolphin Dolphin
Interpreter::subfcx(UGeckoInstruction)
7138 0.3088 libGL.so.177.82 Dolphin (no symbols)
6300 0.2726 libasound.so.2.0.0 Dolphin (no symbols)
6205 0.2685 Dolphin Dolphin
SystemTimers::AdvanceCallback(int)
4849 0.2098 Dolphin Dolphin
Interpreter::addic_rc(UGeckoInstruction)

I profiled just before the "main menu", and kept it running for about twenty seconds
I guess. I didn't count, but I tried to listen to the beautifully stuttering music
for a while. Then I stopped the profiler, posted the report and tried playing the
game again (seriously, how is a profiled version faster than a production version?).

Probably unrelated to the real issue here (as mb2 explained), but I'd still like to
mention it: aren't busy waits evil? :P

I agree with mb2, font textures should be cached and cropped per letter.

How do we go on and do that? :)

And also, it won't be hard to convert the cases in the switch to SSE...

One question though: What's with the SSSE3 pshufb comment? How can it replace stuff
to be faster?

tinctorius, "I profiled just before the "main menu"" that explain why you have tons
of TexDecoder_Decode_real() calls. When fonts appear, texs are decoded then cached.
This slowdown is quite normal. But, after, when we see the whole text in "Main menu"
it stays slow, less slow but still slow. This is more annoying imo.
Can you re-profile there plz? And it would be nice to resolve the other Dolphin's
symbols maybe by using DEBUGFAST for cores AND plugins. That the way we have all
symbols infos on windows.
"aren't busy waits evil?" depends on what you want to do and if you have a quad or not :p
But in that case, I don't know why I did that in the first place since
WaitForFrameFinish() is just a DC safety func. It will be useless (maybe reverted)
when the emulated GPU will be always fast enough.

XK, Each letter are individually cached iirc, not sure but, I think it's become a
GL/driver/gpu speed issue due to tons of heavy ARGB8888 texs (you know more about gx
stuff than me, it's just a guess). And then , as you said, we have to change the way
we store texs in gpu mem. It would be nice, for some format at least, to decode texs
by the gpu, which isn't very loaded on dolphin so far.

Recompiled with flavor=devel (for DEBUGFAST and -g, though -O3 is gone now =/), rerun
emulation with DC enabled. Even before the Nintendo logo it crashed with things about
POSIX threads. Tried again, and then it spammed my console with

Enter: pthread_mutex_lock(0x7fc8d5be3600) failed: Invalid argument
Leave: pthread_mutex_unlock(0x7fc8d5be3600) failed: Invalid argument

ad infinitum. I get the same messages sometimes when the game crashes on other points.

So I tried flavor=prof (r1866 now; and I just noticed "Can't build prof without
oprofile, disabling"... where's "opagent" in Debian? :P), and profiled ONLY when the
"main menu" was 'stabilized' (after the text appeared). Got this:

CPU: AMD64 processors, speed 2210.06 MHz (estimated)
Counted CPU_CLK_UNHALTED events (Cycles outside of halt state) with a unit mask of
0x00 (No unit mask) count 100000
samples % image name app name symbol name
535753 34.5074 anon (tgid:10524 range:0x415ef000-0x427ef000) Dolphin
(no symbols)
483765 31.1589 libPlugin_VideoOGL.so Dolphin
TexDecoder_Decode_real(unsigned char*, unsigned char const*, int, int, int, int, int)
111101 7.1559 Dolphin Dolphin
CommandProcessor::GatherPipeBursted()
98911 6.3708 libc-2.7.so Dolphin memcpy
86436 5.5673 libGLcore.so.177.82 Dolphin (no symbols)
67002 4.3155 anon (tgid:10524 range:0x427ef000-0x427f2000) Dolphin
(no symbols)
46088 2.9685 no-vmlinux no-vmlinux (no symbols)
6863 0.4420 libpthread-2.7.so Dolphin pthread_mutex_lock
5769 0.3716 libmozjs.so.1d xulrunner-stub (no symbols)
5445 0.3507 libGL.so.177.82 Dolphin (no symbols)
5337 0.3438 Dolphin Dolphin
Interpreter::subfcx(UGeckoInstruction)
5245 0.3378 Dolphin Dolphin CoreTiming::Advance()
5195 0.3346 oprofiled oprofiled (no symbols)
4765 0.3069 Dolphin Dolphin
SystemTimers::AdvanceCallback(int)
4355 0.2805 libxul.so xulrunner-stub (no symbols)
3855 0.2483 libasound.so.2.0.0 Dolphin (no symbols)
3765 0.2425 Dolphin Dolphin
Interpreter::addic_rc(UGeckoInstruction)
3299 0.2125 libpthread-2.7.so Dolphin
__pthread_mutex_unlock_usercnt

Implemented SSSE3 version of I4decode

The rest seem easy to do as well. Not sure when I'll have time.

The best thing you can do to help is list the important decodes in a descending
order, ordered by the time it takes...

SSE/SSE2 versions can also be implemented.

Further investigation as suggested by mb2 is blocked by issue 487.

This issue will be done when I finish Streaming SIMD implementations of the texture
decoders.. It should solve this one.

XK, not entirely. I have just found a texture caching bug that invalidate good cached
tlut dependent textures, then have to re-decode them later. This should impact a lot
too, like several FPS I guess. I'm on this one.

Anyway, nice work on texture decoding, keep going :)

Issue 488 has been merged into this issue.

I fixed a texture caching bug.
Can you update and profile. Should change a lot.

Yeah, good work on that mb2, turns out that our hash function skips bytes... It's
hash collisions with the font textures that made it not work fast, right?

Safe texture cache (also font fix for MP1 PAL and other games) is broken since r1871 :/

Safe texture cache, including the 'font fix' effect and the apparent lack of JIT <->
tex cache collisions, works on r1877 for me (MP1 PAL).

Also, mb2's fix did indeed seem to change a lot. The menu is still extremely slow,
but much less than before.

whoops, my bad, it DOES work if i enable it before launching the game.
Enabling it while the game is running is resulting in a green flickering screen :p

nice boost too, i had about 35fps on the menu before, now it's 50fps (PAL full speed) :)

This seems fixed to me then.

Report your speeds tinctorius.

at least on windows, it is !
much faster than before :)

On the 32bit Windows version with really old hardware this never got fixed.

I can't really test Metroid Prime, because I don't own it, but in Tales of Symphonia
GC, which was merged into this, I still slow down to less than half a frame per
second after battles, and during battle if I try to go into the battle menu I slow
down to about 1-2fps per second. In normal conditions I get ~30fps, and in battle I
normally get ~15fps.

My computer specs: AMD Athlon64 3200+ s939, 1gig ram, nVidia Geforce 7950GT

Dolphin settings: D3D9 plugin with the lowest possible settings, OGL Plugin won't run
with my card, Under the general tab: Idle skipping enabled in basic settings, all
settings enabled in Advanced settings, Using D3D9, DSP-HLE, X360pad plugins, sound is
fully enabled.

This doesn't have to do anything with your graphics, it's your processor. Buy a
faster one.

I can't concur. I recently built Dolphin and tried MP1 again. The menu runs WAY too
fast (but still smooth), but whenever the main menu pops up, things slow down
horribly and the audio starts to sound choppy.

This has nothing to do with the graphics card but the processing power to decode the
vertices and the textures each frame. Believe me, I've monitored my gfx card's
activity during active emulation.

Please don't bother getting into subjects that you don't fully know.

OK, so I have Windows 7 Beta (64 bit version) that I'm beta testing on the exact same
machine, I run a multi-boot machine with several operating systems for testing
purposes... Anyways, I ran a little app on here for kickers to find out if my card's
supported any better than in Windows XP, seeing as my card is -supposed- to be opengl
2.1.2 capable, and it's got full support listed, only missing one feature and a
handful of post-2.1.2 extensions. So I downloaded 64-bit dolphin, set it up
similarly to under XP, but using opengl plugin instead (btw, I can't seem to get the
d3d one to work under Windows 7 ATM, but I'll figure that out later)

It's definitely -NOT- my hardware, I run as expected, keeping 25-40fps outside
battle, slowing to ~15fps in battle, with NO additional slow-down from going into the
battle menu or from post-battle stats. So it's not my processor, nor is it my
graphics card, something about my 32-bit configuration is just borked, making it so I
can't run the opengl plugin, and the d3d plugin is just not fixed at all...

I'll have to run further tests, for one thing, running on my Linux install, and
secondly, figure out why I can't use the d3d plugin in my Windows 7 install, but I
think it's safe to say that this is fixed in opengl, but NOT fixed in d3d.

... unrelated to dolphin, but I'm going to need to do some nagging over at nvidia to
find out why the Windows XP drivers are missing so many features that they really
-should- have. I should probably also install Windows XP-64 and find out if those
drivers are more akin to the XP ones or the Win7 ones before I go do my nagging.

i would like to bumb this because the issue came back
i ran mega man X Collection in the menue screen itshows the same thing

its even a 2d game and its just a memmory card screen with black background and 2 words