Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii): Difference between revisions

From Dolphin Emulator Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Line 25: Line 25:
This game suffers from severe stuttering during shader generation. Because of the differences between how the Wii works compared to personal computers, whenever something uses the Wii's GPU, Dolphin must generate a shader to emulate it on a PC GPU. Shader generation causes a slight emulation delay while it's being created, so Dolphin caches these shaders in its shadercache folder to help keep things smooth. Most games don't care about this and play fine, but with ''Metroid Prime 3'', the shaders are so massive that they cause a significant delay, which creates a hard stutter and desyncs the GPU and CPU threads. The game freaks out over this desync, creating a black bar at the bottom of the screen, which takes up 15% of the screen space and "squishes" the game in the remaining space. The black bar will remain there from then on whether stuttering continues or ceases. Going into new areas or showing new effects will cause the stutter and black bar, as well as going in and out of fullscreen and even taking a screenshot. Building up a shadercache of an area helps, but it will still stutter and desync if a new effect or region is loaded.
This game suffers from severe stuttering during shader generation. Because of the differences between how the Wii works compared to personal computers, whenever something uses the Wii's GPU, Dolphin must generate a shader to emulate it on a PC GPU. Shader generation causes a slight emulation delay while it's being created, so Dolphin caches these shaders in its shadercache folder to help keep things smooth. Most games don't care about this and play fine, but with ''Metroid Prime 3'', the shaders are so massive that they cause a significant delay, which creates a hard stutter and desyncs the GPU and CPU threads. The game freaks out over this desync, creating a black bar at the bottom of the screen, which takes up 15% of the screen space and "squishes" the game in the remaining space. The black bar will remain there from then on whether stuttering continues or ceases. Going into new areas or showing new effects will cause the stutter and black bar, as well as going in and out of fullscreen and even taking a screenshot. Building up a shadercache of an area helps, but it will still stutter and desync if a new effect or region is loaded.


There is no solution at this time. Playing with Dual Core disabled or using Sync GPU Thread is the only solution currently available, and both result in a significant performance hit on one of Dolphin's most demanding games. See {{issue|5185}}.
There is no solution at this time. Playing with Dual Core disabled or using Sync GPU Thread is the only solution currently available, and both result in a significant performance hit on one of Dolphin's most demanding games. See {{issue|4336}}.
*PAL users can disable "PAL60 Mode (EuRGB60)" in the Wii settings to prevent the black bar from appearing. The stuttering during shader generation will remain, however.
*PAL users can disable "PAL60 Mode (EuRGB60)" in the Wii settings to prevent the black bar from appearing. The stuttering during shader generation will remain, however.
{{image|MP3 NoSquish.jpg|Correct emulation}}
{{image|MP3 NoSquish.jpg|Correct emulation}}

Revision as of 01:16, 4 March 2015

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Developer(s) Retro Studios
Publisher(s) Nintendo
Series Metroid, Metroid Prime
Platform(s) Wii
Release date(s) JP March 6, 2008
NA August 27, 2007
EU October 26, 2007
AUS November 8, 2007
Genre(s) First-person action-adventure, First-person shooter, Action-adventure
Mode(s) Single-player
Input methods Wii Remote + Nunchuk
Compatibility 5Stars5.pngEdit rating: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)
Perfect
GameIDs
See also...

Trilogy Version
Dolphin Forum thread
Open Issues
Search Google
Search Wikipedia

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is a first-person action-adventure game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console. It is the tenth game in the Metroid series, and the final entry in the Metroid Prime Trilogy. The Wii Remote and Nunchuk devices are featured in a new control scheme that took a year to develop and caused the game's release to be delayed several times.

Gameplay for Metroid Prime 3 is similar to its predecessors: players explore open ended worlds, finding story clues and power ups, solving puzzles, jumping on platforms, and fighting enemies. Unlike past games however, the game is divided into several open worlds; each world is smaller than the single open world environments of Metroid Prime or Metroid Prime 2, but the combined size is greater. As with Metroid Prime 2, exploring the worlds is not aimless: players explore the world freely, but there are specific tasks meant to be accomplished on each world which are told to you beforehand. The game also includes hypermode, a phazon overload system that allows players to exchange health for massive damage. The biggest change is the controls. Metroid Prime 3 uses a new control system using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, allowing free aiming and movement similar to mouse and keyboard controls.

Metroid Prime 3 was also included in Metroid Prime: Trilogy, which includes updated versions of its prequels: Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

Problems

Constant Wiimote Disconnects

Since 3.5-471, when using the MS Bluetooth Stack (the default bluetooth stack on Windows) Prime 3 will think that the wiimote is constantly disconnecting. Pressing Alt-F5 will restore it, but it will disconnect again seconds later. Windows users can disable "Enable Speaker Data" to solve this problem, or move to either the Toshiba Stack or the DolphinBar.

Shader Generation Stuttering and the Black Bar

This game suffers from severe stuttering during shader generation. Because of the differences between how the Wii works compared to personal computers, whenever something uses the Wii's GPU, Dolphin must generate a shader to emulate it on a PC GPU. Shader generation causes a slight emulation delay while it's being created, so Dolphin caches these shaders in its shadercache folder to help keep things smooth. Most games don't care about this and play fine, but with Metroid Prime 3, the shaders are so massive that they cause a significant delay, which creates a hard stutter and desyncs the GPU and CPU threads. The game freaks out over this desync, creating a black bar at the bottom of the screen, which takes up 15% of the screen space and "squishes" the game in the remaining space. The black bar will remain there from then on whether stuttering continues or ceases. Going into new areas or showing new effects will cause the stutter and black bar, as well as going in and out of fullscreen and even taking a screenshot. Building up a shadercache of an area helps, but it will still stutter and desync if a new effect or region is loaded.

There is no solution at this time. Playing with Dual Core disabled or using Sync GPU Thread is the only solution currently available, and both result in a significant performance hit on one of Dolphin's most demanding games. See issue 4336.

  • PAL users can disable "PAL60 Mode (EuRGB60)" in the Wii settings to prevent the black bar from appearing. The stuttering during shader generation will remain, however.

Pixelation Glitches

A large pixelated block may appear in the upper left area of the frame. It may only appear during movement (newer revisions) or be stuck there permanently (older revisions). To avoid this problem, use the D3D graphics backend.

Bloom Offset

Prime 3 has noticeable bloom offset problems. It will have several copies of the bloom spread out from the source, and can be very distracting. The only solution is to disable "Scaled EFB Copy", but this has some issues of its own. See issue 5573.

Visors

Visors will only work if EFB to Ram is enabled. Though EFB to Ram is forced by the GameINI, visor corruption may still occur if you open the graphics configuration window during gameplay. Turn on EFB to Ram in the Dolphin GUI to avoid any problems.

Dot

When playing above 1x Native internal resolution, there is a dot in the center of the screen. It's small and easy to ignore, but it's always there. There is no fix for this problem.

Savestates

Using save states in MP3 will crash Dolphin. Use the in-game saving to avoid any problems. Seems to have been fixed in the recent builds (4.0-5615 and onward).

Refraction Slowdown

Refraction effects, such as raindrops on Samus' visor and the heat effect after firing her weapon for an extended period, cause slowdown on all backends. OpenGL is affected worse, though D3D is affected as well. It also has slowdowns when several grapple points (yellow pulsing) are present on screen at once. Even the strongest computers are affected by this issue, and there is no solution at this time. Fixed by 4.0-5124.

Blue Startup Video

Since 4.0-216, the opening video is... blue. It goes away as soon as a wiimote appears on the screen or after a period of time. It has no effect on gameplay. See issue 6783. Fixed by 4.0-3334.

Configuration

Only configuration options for the best compatibility where they deviate from defaults are listed.

Wii Remote

Config Setting Notes
Enable Speaker Data Disabled Causes constant wiimote disconnects

Version Compatibility

The graph below charts the compatibility with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption since Dolphin's 2.0 release, listing revisions only where a compatibility change occurred.

Δ
5.0-21270 (current)
Δ
Δ
Δ
Δ
Δ
2.0 (r5384)
Compatibility can be assumed to align with the indicated revisions. However, compatibility may extend to prior revisions or compatibility gaps may exist within ranges indicated as compatible due to limited testing. Please update as appropriate.

Testing

This title has been tested on the environments listed below:

Test Entries
Revision OS CPU GPU Result Tester
r5442 Windows 7 x64 Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 @ 2.6GHz nVidia GeForce GTX 275 Intro slow, but in game full speed.
r7111 Windows 7 x64 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 ATI Radeon HD 5770 20/40 frames
r7478 Windows 7 x64 Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz AMD Radeon HD 6950 Works great. Real Wiimote errors. Have to use emulated Wiimote. Robodt7
r7670 Windows 7 x64 Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.1GHz AMD Radeon HD 6850 Runs flawlessly. 60fps all the time. Still has Wiimote control lag issues. Red blooming from light sources now fixed. MegaJump
r7670 Windows 7 x64 Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.3GHz nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti Struggle to reach 60fps. Enabling any kind of anti-aliasing has a serious hit on performance 20-40 frames on 4x internal res. boeoz
4.0.2-2879 Windows 8.1 x64 Intel Core i5-3570k nVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti Game runs fine but slows down a lot in some places. Sometimes only the sound gets a little bit laggy but the graphics are okay, sometimes both are laggy. Map almost always is laggy. Reducing Internal Resolution helps, but not much. HLE seems a little bit better, though it suddenly stops in some cutscenes. Thales
4.0-4167 Windows 8.1 x64 Intel Core i5-3570k nVidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti Running just fine! Great improvement from last test. No major slowdowns and no visible annonying glitches, at least with my DSP & graphics configuration. Thales

Gameplay Videos