Emulator

Issue 6907 has been merged into this issue.

I can confirm this happening on various games with vsync on and frame limiter off.

This also happens in the software renderer, which makes it unusable when using dual core, sometimes showing flickering screens, other times throwing lots of error messages.

Fire Emblem Path of Radiance seems to suffer from crashing during the stress test I presented above.

According to the forums the dc-netplay branch [1] should fix the desyncs in Skies of Arcadia Legends [2] (those happen relative frequently on a stock 2500k). Another way to provoke those desyncs is to use save states, both loading and saving has a high probability of desyncing.

Sadly this branch is relatively out of date. Also I can't view those commits on github.

[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/download/list/dc-netplay/
[2] https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-gc-skies-of-arcadia-legends--26018?pid=311001#pid311001

You can view the commits at http://code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu/source/list?name=dc-netplay if you really want to.

I managed to desync dc-netplay 3.5-2304 with Skies of Arcadia Legends. With dc-netplay 3.5-2468 I could not reproduce a desync while playing until the departure to Shrine Island without framelimit.

Skies of Arcadia Legends update: 3.5-2443 dc-netplay still desyncs while 3.5-2445 seems to not desnyc (but crashes very seldomly with some GPU releated stuff). Hope this helps.

I'll my comment in the hope Delroth won't close this bug as he did with the other.

I got this even with Xenoblade, even if the outcome is shown a little differently. It still crashes/freezes too, and the netplay branch also causes it to run without freezing.

Same with the two Zeldas and Skies of Arcadia. These are those I sometime test to check if there was any progress.

Issue 7354 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 6705 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 3198 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 6678 has been merged into this issue.

Just pasting and cleaning up what I originally wrote in issue 6458. The StarFox Adventures demo that's in the July 2002 Multigame Demo Disc (US) hangs and potentially crashes Dolphin after the Rareware logo fades and before the FMV plays with the dual core setting enabled (having it disabled runs the game normally throughout). This problem still occurs as of 4.0-2071 (15c1250d9d3f7aa7821a142582d63f38f782f15a). However, the latest build in the dc-netplay branch (4.0-652 - c5b1ec3329d47006bfddb381f730ad4310528b00) doesn't have this problem. Here's a quick summary from issue 6458 so that it can be merged:

Game ID?

G95E01 - Interactive Multi Game Demo Disc Jul. 2002
GSAJ0 - Star Fox Adventures Demo (08 2002.05.17 E3_2002_StarFox)

What went wrong?

If you try and run the Star Fox Adventures demo with dual core on (with JIT core), the following errors can occur when the title screen's opening video starts to play (after the rareware logo fades):

a.) It either crashes Dolphin out right
b.) Game hangs with annoying sound, then proceeds to crash Dolphin 

It's safe to say that the video that plays in the beginning is causing the issue.
The final retail release (GSAE01) works normally. Although I do remember this game having issues similar to this many years a go.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

This will depend either or not you bother running the game from within the demo disc or you ripped the demo tgc file from the demo disc and converted it to a GCM. But this will assume you did the latter.

(make sure to have dual core enabled and JIT core as well):
1.) Start the game
2.) After the Nintendo and Rare logo screens fade out, a 3D monitor will appear to start plaything the movie. At this point, Dolphin will present one of the 3 variations I mentioned before

Issue 6458 has been merged into this issue.

The game might be desyncing because of the RTC. To test if this is the case, turn on Dolphin movie recording and check if that prevents the game from freezing:

From the Dolphin, start the game. Once the game has started, stop the game, and then from the Dolphin menu, select Emulation > Start Recording. Now start playing, and see if the game freezes.

Let us know if movie recording makes a difference to this issue.

Nope, the same thing still occurs. :(

Issue 7637 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 7678 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 6541 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 6931 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 7767 has been merged into this issue.

I have been playing Skies of Arcadia Legends and experienced this issue. I noticed that it would crash whenever I opened Google Chrome while playing. Dual core was enabled. I am playing on Windows 7 with a GTX 570. If there's more info. I can provide, please let me know.

From time to time I test the new version with Skies of Arcadia and I also report that nothing has changed.

The weird issue is that around August or September I tested a version of Dolphin that would SKYROCKET in speed, with the game. And this obviously also made the game crash less.

I think this was in the middle of the optimizations done by Fiora. It was great.

In the last month, though, everything reverted. For this game now performance is absolutely TERRIBLE, much, much worse than how it was before the optimization started. Where I was getting 40 fps, now I get 10.

So I don't know what to think. I had good hopes at some point, but now at least for this game things look bleak.

Err, nevermind.

I don't delete the comment because it might be useful to someone:

the slowdown was not related to the latest versions. It seems about the EFB copies option. If I disable it entirely the game runs super fast (and seems to work).

Might be that I changed it to test Xenoblade.

For the record:

I tried adding:
GPUDeterminismMode fake-completion

to the "default" ini of the game (if I add it through the "edit config" it gets erased as soon I close it). I thought this might have an effect on the crashing, but nope, no difference.

I'm not even sure if it's properly loaded since I don't know if the way of adding it I used is the right one.

Other observations:

For some reason OpenGL sometimes drops to 11 fps or so, even if the emulation is at 100%. I thought it depended on the "skip EFB access" setting, but after more messing with the options it now does it regardless how I set that option. It's weird. Closing and restarting Dolphin doesn't fix it, and it doesn't seem related to any option specifically.

The limiter somehow gives lower performance. In the sense that if in a scene I get around 20 fps with the limiter on, if I run through the same scene with the limiter off I hover instead around 30 fps (the game should run at 25). So if it can do 30 I wonder why it falls to 20.

You need to add an equal to it GPUDeterminismMode = fake-completion.

At least, that's what I think it's supposed to be. We'll be adding it to the game properties page soon for easier access.

...wow.

Not only that option fixed the crashes completely (previously I could make it crash within 10 seconds from booting), but it also has excellent performance.

It also seems to work equally well in Xenoblade, where also I was getting crashes from time to time.

It's basically magic.

yeah; it's meant to make dualcore return the same results as singlecore. It does not work in all titles, but when it does work, it's a 10% performance down in exchange for very high stability and determinism.

Something weird to report:

I was trying to test performance impact, but it varies too wildly.

• Boot the game, load a quicksave: 58 fps fixed
• Close, reboot, reload: 39/40 fps
• Close, reboot, reload: 34 fps
• Close, reboot, reload: 51 fps
• Close, reboot, reload: 31 fps
• Close, reboot, reload: 52 fps

So I get everything from 30 to 59.

The weird thing is that it's not just momentary. If I get 59 fps after a reload, then I get consistently MUCH HIGHER fps. If it's low, it stays low.

Does the performance inconsistency happen, if you don't use savestates?

What system do you use?

Does it affect Skies of Arcadia, Xenoblade or both?

I'm unable to reproduce the inconsistencies.

No background programs running, not using quicksaves (just loading the game's save), same result.

I'm simply running Skies of Arcadia with limiter off, OpenGL. One time it's 59 fps, then 54, then 47, then it goes to 30. And so on. When it's high it usually stays consistently high even if I wait, if it's low instead it risks losing even more.

I don't even need to close Dolphin. Just close the game window and restart.

E8400 3Ghz CPU, Geforce 750Ti

I tried giving a fixed clock to the GPU but it makes no difference at all (the CPU is bottleneck since I'm even playing at 2x and not more).

It might be because the code reaches one of those typical desynch and so tries to keep the synch at a lower speed? I have no idea, but sometimes it's super fast, and sometimes it's half the speed it could have. Completely at random.

It's also weird that running uncapped 59 fps = 100% CPU utilization.

Capped at 25 fps, so a lot less than even half the speed = 80% CPU utilization.

As a test I tried running the game with framelimiter on, and then run it with framelimiter off, but with an external framelimiter on.

In the first case, the CPU usage stays very high, but it drops on both cores almost uniformly.

In the second case (external framelimiter) the first core drops a lot more, while the second core stays higher. Overall, CPU total usage is less than the first case (like 74% versus 80%), but less uniform.

After more testing and latest version, it's now a bit slower, but I still get degrading performance over time.

The same spot can go from 59 fps down to 30. And 30 is what I get when Dual Core is completely disabled.

So there something preventing hard crashes, but that also slows down performance

Issue 7898 has been merged into this issue.

And now I can confirm that the performance variance still depends on desynchs.

I observed for example that booting the game I see 55 fps fixed. Then I go in the background, reload a page on Firefox to steal some cpu. After it's over the game fps stay at something like 37/40, even when the cpu returns completely free. It never catches up with the previous 55 fps.

When it does this also the CPU usage goes down instead of sitting at 100% like when the game runs as fast as possible.

So there is indeed some compensation method that tries slowing the game down when desynch occurs. It doesn't crash anymore, but it slows down a lot, and never goes back to high performance, just says as low as running the game without Dual Core.

I believe I'm suffering a symptom of this issue, but I'm not sure, I considered opening a new issue but figured I'd look for one first.

Every time I boot a game (especially one that plays cinematics before getting to the game or frontend) I get no sound for a little while, and when the sound starts playing it's garbled to maybe 10x speed, until it catches up with the game and continues normally. However I can confirm this happens in both single and dual core modes. However after this, I get no further desyncs.

MofoMan2000: Does this happen only with the OpenAL backend?

Huh. Apparently it does. Is there perhaps a different issue I should be looking at after all?

I only really noticed this yesterday.

No idea if there is a proper bug for it.

It looks like issue 7955 is the one I'm looking for. Sorry to clutter this up and spam everyone.

Issue 8017 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8017 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8060 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8190 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8341 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8435 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 6897 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8538 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 4957 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8641 has been merged into this issue.

Issue 8014 has been merged into this issue.

Sonic Adventure 2 - Battle inevitably crashes with dual core enabled. Syncing GPU Thread doesn't help. I noticed that wasn't in the list or wasn't mentioned by anyone (ctrl+f).

Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince (RH6E69) displays only black /w Dual Core enabled.

Also:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Hasbro_Family_Game_Night_2

Also:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Goblin_Commander:_Unleash_the_Horde#Problems

Also:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Cartoon_Network:_Punch_Time_Explosion_XL
Where invalid read errors occur in Dual Core mode

Yakuman Wii: Ide Yosuke no Kenkou Mahjong‎‎ has dualcore issues where save file character select miis flicker, and the character select screen flickers in and out of existence.

Super Monkey Ball (GMBE8P) Advanced Stage 10 seems to randomly stretch the screen then quickly return it to the proper size (widescreen mode detection issue?) on 5.0-12369. Single core does not have this problem. Let me know if I should file a separate issue for this.

Some Namco arcade games on virtual console have dualcore flickering and opcode issues for the first menu when starting the games.

Hello, I am having random game crashes while playing Fire Emblem Path of Radiance on windows, tried to disable the dual core as advised here, but when i do the game wont even emulate game, the whole emulator crashes on game start. Anyone has an idea what could help?

redmail5 wrote:

Hello, I am having random game crashes while playing Fire Emblem Path of Radiance on windows, tried to disable the dual core as advised here, but when i do the dolphin wont even emulate game, the whole emulator crashes on game start. Anyone has an idea what could help?

This question is better asked at the forums.

It seems like the dual core setting isn't terribly stable on the Steam Deck. I was playing Path of Radiance and while the game ran fine, crashes could triggered quite easily simply by opening the steam menu, or entering sleep mode. Luckily the game runs quite well without the option enabled.