ATI Driver performance issues? 5.26 Mac Mini (Early 2011)

pceslayer

Not sure if this is a driver issue, but I’m experiencing a huge performance loss in Dolphin after upgrading to 5.26.

In Batocera 5.25 I could play most games at a steady 50-60fps @1080p. 4 player splitscreen Mario Kart for Wii and Gamecube ran @1080p with some stuttering, but perfectly playable…

Now in Batocera 5.26 I get maybe 8fps in Mario Kart Wii @1080p in single player. I have to drop down to SD resolutions (720×400) to get similar (but still worse) performance .

Mac Mini (Mid 2011)
CPU: Core i5-2520M
RAM: 8GB DDR3-1600mhz
GPU: Radeon HD 6630M w/ 256MB DDR5
Batocera Installed to internal HDD

The specs of this machine aren’t great, but everything was working fine until the upgrade to 5.26. Unfortunately I cannot bypass the ATI GPU in favor of the HD3000 built into the CPU.

When I get some more time I will make some comparisons between the two releases. I’ll also test more emulator cores.

pceslayer

Never mind, I’m guessing it has to do with this…. fix: Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii) - fixed upscaled resolutions

Was Dolphin scaling internal SD resolutions to 1080p instead of rendering it native? Is there a way to recreate that behavior?

joinski

pceslayer

Your performance issues could have to be related to the issue, that at default the internal resolution in dolphin is set to “Auto (Multiple of 640×528)”

There is one way in ES Menu, via Game Settings, Per System Advanced Settings, Gamecube/Wii and then “TV Mode” to decrease the resolution. But this will not only decrease the internal Emulator Resolution but also the displayed resolution of your TV/Monitor (for example if you have a 1080p TV, then at default the displayed resolution (of Emulation Station and all emulators) is 1080p also. But the internal resolution of the respective emulators can be different).

There is a way to change only the internal emulator resolution of dolphin:
Connect a keyboard and press F1 while in ES Main Menu (where you see all systems), then navigate to Applications and open dolphin-emu-config.
There you can open Graphics Settings and activate V-Sync (to avoid screen-tearing) and set the internal emulator resolution from “Auto (Multiple of 640×528)” to for example 1x native.
Now you can start a game within dolphin-emu-config when you go to Open Game in the upper left corner and then navigate to the gamecube/wii rom-folder.
Unfortunately, if you exit dolphin-emu-confg and open a Gamecube or Wii game through the Games-List in Emulation Station, some of the settings you changed in dolphin-emu-config are automatically reverted back to default (like internal resolution for example). This is an issue that hopefully will be fixed or where the devs are working on to maybe implement an option in ES Menu to not only change TV-Mode (“external” /displayed resolution of your TV/Monitor) but also the internal emulator resolution (more userfriendly).

pceslayer

joinski

Thanks for the response. The option to edit the dolphin config does not work. As soon as I launch any game game the config reverts to the default setting. I can confirm setting the internal resolution to 1 manually inside of a game config file works, but only until I reboot my pc. Setting it to 1 fixed all of my performance issues. Too bad this setting seems to get reverted extremely easily. When dropping the resolution down in the advanced emulator configs, performance is still far worse than setting the internal resolution to 1x. Even at 640×400 it was only about 75% the speed.

Hopefully in the next release there will be an option under advanced emulator configs to set the internal resolution directly like they added for ppsspp.

Here are the steps I took to force a game to manually run at 1x internal resolution.

SSH into batocera, navigate to the following path:
root>usr>share>dolphin-emu>sys>GameSettings

Once there I googled the Title ID of the game I wanted to play, Mario Kart Wii (RMC01 for NA version) so I found
RMC.ini in the directory and then I ran:

nano RMC.ini

add the following line to the bottom

[Video_Settings]
InternalResolution = 1

save

pceslayer

Here are the steps I took to force a game to manually run at 1x internal resolution. This has to be done for each game.

SSH into batocera using a terminal emulator like putty… navigate to the following path:
root>usr>share>dolphin-emu>sys>GameSettings

Once there I googled the Title ID of the game I wanted to play, Mario Kart Wii (RMC01 for NA version), so I found
RMC.ini (partial title id to cover all regions) in the directory and then I ran the following to edit:

nano RMC.ini
(You’ll know if you picked the correct file because the Game Title will be displayed at the top once opened)

add the following line to the very bottom

[Video_Settings]
InternalResolution = 1

save the file and launch the game.

This is another method….

joinski Connect a keyboard and press F1 while in ES Main Menu (where you see all systems), then navigate to Applications and open dolphin-emu-config.
There you can open Graphics Settings and activate V-Sync (to avoid screen-tearing) and set the internal emulator resolution from “Auto (Multiple of 640×528)” to for example 1x native.
Now you can start a game within dolphin-emu-config when you go to Open Game in the upper left corner and then navigate to the gamecube/wii rom-folder.
Unfortunately, if you exit dolphin-emu-confg and open a Gamecube or Wii game through the Games-List in Emulation Station, some of the settings you changed in dolphin-emu-config are automatically reverted back to default (like internal resolution for example). This is an issue that hopefully will be fixed or where the devs are working on to maybe implement an option in ES Menu to not only change TV-Mode (“external” /displayed resolution of your TV/Monitor) but also the internal emulator resolution (more userfriendly).