Visual Glitches

There is no perfect setup, each setting behaves different depending on your hardware and combination of settings. This wiki page is written to prioritise performance first. The suggested settings do not guarantee a solution, but work with most hardware and maintain the best framerate possible.

Savestates

If you savestate while there is a glitch in your game, you will save the glitch and it will be loaded into memory again once you loadstate. Savesates can cause many problems including visual, audio and gameplay errors.

You should always fully restart your game after applying these settings changes.

Why do visual glitches occur? (Aka Desyncs)

The number one biggest cause of visual glitches is Dual Core mode, which creates a secondary thread for the graphics. This option is inherently a hack, but it is quite good for performance. Visual glitches usually occur when the game needs access to certain values (related to EFB, XFB, etc) but they are not ready yet. This can be solved by synchronising the GPU thread with the CPU thread (aka Synchronise GPU Thread), however this causes a performance hit making the game run nearly as slowly as Single Core mode. Alternatively, you can completely disable Dual Core, and follow the other options in the performance guide.

The frequency of de-syncs massively depends on hardware and settings. Hardware closer to the higher end can often evade the desyncs, and use the most optimal settings. See the next section for that setup.

GFX FIFO: Unknown Opcode

This issue is usually caused by desyncs on particular GPUs such as the Intel HD series. You may try resolve by changing your video backend to D3D11, otherwise your only option is to disable Dual Core.

Most Optimal Setup

Game Properties

How do I add my game so that I can go to Game Properties?

You can go to the Game Properties by right clicking your game and selecting Properties.

• Enable Dual Core should be on.
• Synchronize GPU thread should be off.

Hacks Tab

• Store XFB Copies to Texture Only ensure this is enabled.
• Immediately Present XFB can sometimes solve the flickering logo glitch, however this is not recommended as it is not a consistent fix and often introduces a large black bar on the bottom or top of the screen. This bar can flicker as badly as the logo glitch.

Stable Performance Setup

Game Properties

Enabling Synchronise GPU Thread can solve most glitches such as the "black bar" glitch with XFB and the purple logo flicker but causes a moderate performance loss.

Enabling HLE (fast) can give a decent performance increase, but note some people have reported poorer audio with this option.

To try counteract the performance hit of Synchronise GPU Thread, see our performance guide..

Graphics

Many people, especially with weaker hardware will benefit from setting their Video Backend to Direct3D11. This backend is the best for stability while not entirely sacrificing performance. This option can be found in Graphics > General.

Complete Stability Setup

Unfortunately this setup is much heavier on performance.

In Game Properties:

• Disable Enable Dual Core

In Graphics > Hacks:

• Disable Immediately Present XFB

This isn't very good for performance, but this is the strongest way to prevent Visual Glitches and will prevent desyncs as dual core is completely disabled. You may need to reset your Dolphin settings as some other unknown setting has broken your game. If this also fails, please ask in the Discord support channel and let us know everything has failed.

If your game still has visual glitches after these steps, it's possible your dump is corrupted or damaged.

Known Related PrimeHack Bugs

• Problems scanning small objects in Prime 3.
• Rendering Issues at high FOVs (above 94)