Emulator Issues #8116
closed
Metroid Prime - extreme sluggishness in the map
0%
Description
Game Name?
Metroid Prime
Game ID?
GM8E01
What's the problem? Describe what went wrong in few words.
When entering the map (Z button) inside of an zone with a sufficiently large layout, the map screen slows to a crawl.
What did you expect to happen instead?
That the map screen would be smooth as butter.
What steps will reproduce the problem?
- Boot Metroid Prime
- Travel to the Chozo Ruins location by way of the first door on your right when facing outward from Samus' ship
- As soon as you enter the Chozo Ruins by way of the elevator, open the map
- Observe the slowdown
Dolphin 3.5 and 3.5-367 are old versions of Dolphin that have
known issues and bugs, so don't report issues about them and test the
latest Dolphin version first.
Which versions of Dolphin did you test on?
4.0-5147
Does using an older version of Dolphin solve your issue? If yes, which
versions of Dolphin used to work?
4.0-4647
What are your PC specifications? (including, but not limited to: Operating
System, CPU and GPU)
MacBook Air 11-inch, Mid-2012
2GHz Intel Core i7
8GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
512GB Samsung SSD
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1024MB VRAM
OS X 10.10.1
Is there any other relevant information? (e.g. logs, screenshots,
configuration files)
I'm not quite sure when exactly the change happened, but I know it was before build 5075. I can do some investigating later once I get some more time. Thanks.
Updated by
Updated by JMC4789 over 9 years ago
- Status changed from Duplicate to Questionable
Your issue is not duplicate, but I'm not sure it's valid either. Basically, OGL had a broken line-width implementation, and it was fixed by actually emulating the feature properly. This causes this area to run a lot slower, since, ya know, it's actually emulating it properly which is a lot harder on our computers.
Updated by veegee over 9 years ago
I managed to figure out where the issue began and have also recorded a video, showing the issue in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGVbId0DfqY
4.0-4674 worked fine
4.0-4699 wouldn't run the game in any playable fashion
4.0-4701 is where the issue arose
Cheers!
Updated by Armada over 9 years ago
- Status changed from Questionable to Won't fix
Those are exactly the builds in which the line-width geometry shaders were added. Unfortunately the geometry shader performance on Intel HD Graphics is not that good.
The line-width geometry shader is more accurate and fixes a ton of issues. The old method was deprecated, but had better performance on weak GPUs. However I don't plan on supporting the old method again.
Updated by Armada over 9 years ago
If you think it's an actual bug with the shader then compare it with the D3D backend. Compare the performance to OGL and also check if there was any regression of performance on D3D since the merge.
Updated by JMC4789 over 9 years ago
I don't think it's a bug within the shader; I'm just saying it's not because of Intel HD.
Updated by veegee over 9 years ago
Wouldn't this also have an effect on the in-game performance, though? If it were simply an issue with OpenGL? This only occurs when the map is pulled up, which I'd assume (with my limited knowledge) wouldn't put nearly as much stress on the GPU.
If it helps, I'll try it out with the software renderer when I get home and report back.
Updated by JMC4789 over 9 years ago
Actually, what led me to believe it was a line-width regression is because line-width is only used during that menu. Basically, the game is using a relatively hard to emulate effect (at least in this case, Line-width) a lot in one particular screen.
The rest of the game wouldn't be affected for the exact reason that it doesn't use line-width as heavily.
Updated by Armada over 9 years ago
The software renderer is useless as far as performance benchmarks go, it's just there for accuracy tests.
And the geometry shader stage is disabled unless there are lines on the screen. As soon as you pull up the map the geometry stage is activated on your GPU and that causes it to slow down. Unfortunately from now on we will rely on the geometry shader stage so we can't simply solve the reduction in performance.
So you're saying even a high-end GPU slows down significantly? That would be interesting, since that may indicate some other bottleneck such as uniforms being uploaded too often.
Updated by JMC4789 over 9 years ago
Yeah; my GTX 760 is getting wrecked down to 47 fps. I can try it on my brother's GTX 970 sometime; but on my GTX 560m it's like, no chance, 10 - 15 fps.
Updated by lmello over 6 years ago
Even on a GTX 1060 6GB + OpenGL the map rendering is slow in some areas; notably Chozo Ruins and Phaedrana Drifts. With Vulkan this particular shader is much faster and there's no slowdown when accessing the map.