Predicting shaders was considered, but the developers decided it would be too performance intensive, and due to the way games are programmed, likely wouldn't be effective, anyway. One amusing example is generating all the shaders beforehand, but the blog points out there are more possible graphical effects on the GameCube/Wii than there are grains of sand on Earth, so that seems impractical. So the developers tried to figure out a solution. But you're still going to experience stuttering as you encounter new effects, and upgrading builds, changing drivers, etc. That's why as you play games like Metroid Prime in Dolphin, the stuttering becomes less common.

Typically a stutter only lasts a couple of frames, but on really demanding scenes with multiple compiling shaders, stutters of over a second are possible.'ĭolphin can cache shaders, so once a game has compiled a shader, it shouldn't cause stuttering again. Usually the compilation will take place in under a frame and users will be none the wiser, but when it takes longer than a frame, the game will visibly stop until the compilation is complete. 'To deal with this disparity, Dolphin's only option is to delay the CPU thread while the GPU thread and the video driver perform the compilation - essentially pausing the emulated GC/Wii. Dolphin has to translate those effects into shaders, and shaders have to be compiled, which takes time.

In the GameCube/Wii GPU's case, configurations aren't stored in memory, and they can be called instantly. They can be preconfigured, since the hardware will never change.

Consoles have fixed hardware, unlike PCs, so their shaders aren't written in the same way. Understand so far? Okay, so here's the problem with emulating shaders.

Dolphin emulator shader cache mac