Hi, I hope someone here can help me. I have spent hours messing with Dolphin with no fix. The game I'm trying to play is Mario Galaxy 2. The problem I'm having is with the sound. It stutters and clips in and out.
It doesn't stutter at all if I set Dolphin to DSP HLE, but the music disappears after about two minutes and doesn't come back. Set to DSP LLE the music never completely disappears, but the sound stutters like crazy. The frames per second never drop below 45 though.
Even with the most basic settings there is sound problems. I have an external sound card and an internal one, using neither one makes a difference. I have tried other games and there are sound problems on those also.
I have tried the game in full screen and in windowed mode. In windowed mode I'm able to look at how much drain there is for each of the cores on the cpu using a program I have. The drain doesn't go above 90%. There is one major thing I noticed, If I go to the processes in windows task manager and right click on the Dolphin program and pick set affinity, it let's me choose how many cores Dolphin is allowed to use. If I set it to one core the sound problem completely goes away. However the game is unplayable because it runs at only 20 frames per second and moves so slow since one core isn't enough for smooth game playing. If I set Dolphin to use two or more cores the sound problem comes back again.
Does anyone have a solution. Dolphin graphics look so much better than playing through my wii. My computer is definitely powerful enough for Dolphin so things should work. Computer specs are Radeon hd 7870 overclocked edition, i5-2500k, g.skill 8gb pc3-14900, Windows 7 64bit, motherboard Asrock Extreme4 gen3. Please up if you can, I'm sure there's smarter people out there that know more about this stuff.
Try using openAL on the latest build.
Overclock your i5 2500k to 4.4GHz !!!
LLE will give you excelent audio if the frames per second never drop below 60 FPS !!!
_Right-click the game - Properties - Tick "Vbeam emulation" and untick "Idle Skipping"
If your FPS is under 60, and you are using DSP LLE, your sound will stutter.
I tried all the suggestions. Overclocked my 15-2500k cpu to 4.4ghz, Tried LLE on Thread, set audio to openAL. Overclocking helped some, and setting LLE on thread helped some more. I Ticked "Vbeam emulation" and unticked "Idle Skipping" and that also helped some.
Before doing these things Mario Super Galaxy 2 sound would stutter right at start of game. Now it stutters a lot about a minute into the game when giant Bowser is walking around. I then tried setting sound to openAL and now the sound doesn't stutter when frames per second drop below 60, but audio sounds distorted when frames per second drop below 60 with openAL audio. It's better then stuttering sound, but not by much.
All the other settings for Dolphin except for the ones listed above have been set to best game speed settings shown at this website. http://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/settings/.
I don't understand why with a 4 core 15-2500k cpu clocked to 4.4ghz, and a Radeon hd 7870 overclocked edition graphics card, with Dolphin settings set to low video quality; why am I unable to run these games without sound problems. I checked the settings for my video card in the "Catalyst Control Center" and there all set to the default. I also tried overclocking my video card and it helped a little, but I way overclocked it just to test things and wouldn't want to push it that hard for long.
Is anyone else here with my video card and cpu able to run Mario Galaxy 2 without sound problems with Dolphin set to LLE? Would love to use HLE but after about 2 minutes the music stops in games and never starts again.
I hope someone can help me figure out a solution. It's frustrating to see online that others are running games with the same or lower end graphics cards without problems.
Next I'll try running dolphin on Linux and also try a fresh install of windows.
Why would you have to do that ?
_Framelimit = 60 , Tick "Limit by FPS"
I've only got an i7 with 2.6 and 3.4 GHz at boost, but SMG will run smooth with LLE only when I disable "Skip EFB Access from CPU".
This small checkbox is also responsible for a lot slowdowns in even not so demanding games (like a few backgrounds in RE:Remake, when you look at lamps in RE4, when you look around in several rooms in MP1). Disabling this has no visible side effect but the slowdowns stop instantly.
Sadly SMG needs this checked to pull stars.