FPS Drops in Dolphin

[lukifer]

Hey all. So I've been trying out PM on Dolphin recently because I'd like to get into netplay. I've only practiced against CPUs so far because I wanted to be sure I could play it smoothly before going online, however I've been getting frequent FPS drops. Roughly every 20 secs on average the game will stutter for half a second and the sound skips. Otherwise I can play it at a consistent 60 FPS. My specs are Core i7 5700, 16 GB of RAM, GTX 970M so I'm well above the typical hardware requirements.

I'm using the virtual SD method suggested here: https://www.smashladder.com/guides/view/264y/project-m/project-m-netplay-the-sd-method. I'm using all of the Dolphin settings suggested in that guide and I'm playing in fullscreen so it should be getting the benefit of exclusive fullscreen mode. I've tried both OpenGL and Direct3D for graphics with little change between the two.

At first I thought it might be an issue with slow reads from the hard drive so I moved Dolphin and the ISO to the smaller SSD in my machine without much improvement. Some of the other threads I've read suggested that these "hiccups" could be caused by shaders being compiled, but I'm not convinced that's the issue since I get the same problem while the game is idle in menus.

Anyone have any suggestions? Or perhaps I'm expecting too much and it's not really possible to play the game at a consistent 60 FPS through Dolphin.

 

[Wise Multishine]

I'm having similar issues. When the first few hits of a match happen, the game stutters for less than a second. And it stutters at other certain moments as well. I opened up my task manager and saw that the stutters would happen whenever the disk needed to do any work. I'm looking up ways to fix this. I would look other places for a solution. Micro stuttering can be caused by many things.

If you've already solved the problem, help would be appreciated.