PROJECT 64 EMULATOR STUTTERING FULL

Modern GPUs are incredibly flexible, but this flexibility comes at a cost - they are insanely complicated.

PROJECT 64 EMULATOR STUTTERING FULL

All in an effort to emulate the full range of the GameCube/Wii's proto-programmable pipeline without falling victim to this pesky stuttering.

A journey that would take multiple GPU engineers across two years. That hope is what fueled an arduous journey against seemingly impossible odds. A theory that would take hundreds, if not thousands, of person-hours just to see if it was possible. It started out as a theory that had a chance of working. Despite this, some still privately held onto a glimmer of hope. Ironically, we hated the stuttering as much as anyone else, but the sheer insanity of the task was enough to keep most developers away. It was something that was deemed unfixable and was garnering a lot of ill will and frustration within the community. There was some frustration and even antipathy from the developers toward shader compilation stuttering. While some of this may be partially due to increased GPU requirements from integer math, the bigger cause was actually that the stuttering stuck out more with there now being fewer serious issues otherwise. Since the release of Dolphin 4.0, users have actually complained about shader compilation stuttering at an increasing rate even. Though emulation has improved to near perfection in many titles, the stuttering has remained the same over the years. When games barely ran at all, a little stutter here and there wasn't a big deal. This problem has been a part of Dolphin since the very beginning, but has only recently become more of a focus.

The slowdown when loading new areas, effects, models, and more is commonly referred to as 'Shader Compilation Stuttering,' by users and developers alike. Yet, every time you go to a new area, or load a new effect, there's a very slight but noticeable 'stutter.' You turn off the framelimiter to check and your computer can run the game at well over full speed. The game is running full speed, there are no graphical glitches, and you can use your favorite controller if you want. When you're playing your favorite game on Dolphin with a powerful computer, things should run fairly well.

Project 64 emulator stuttering