Loads Metroid Prime 4: Beyond – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
REPORT UPDATE : Vi-O-La bike room: ~5 FPS (1 CPU thread at 100%), ~1 FPS in next area, then hard crash
What happened
1) Severe slowdown in the Vi-O-La bike room
- In the room with several replicas, FPS drops to ~5 (frame time ~208 ms).
- GPU usage only ~18% (3D engine ~6%); total CPU ~30-48%, but ONE logical core sits at 100% while the other 11 are mostly idle.
- As soon as the image is static (pause menu, scan visor), it instantly goes back to 60 FPS. Looks like the emulated GPU command processing thread is the bottleneck when many objects are drawn.
- No shader compilation storm in the log at that time (only a few runtime pipelines per 10 s). Same result in docked and handheld mode, so not resolution-related.
1b) Worse in the next area, then crash
- The slowdown does not go away after leaving the bike room: in the next area of the same building (complex geometry) FPS dropped to ~1. The log shows 50-85 s gaps with no activity at all.
- Then Lichii closed abruptly: the log is cut in the middle of a line (~5083 s), no error, no exception, nothing in crash_dumps. Looks like a hard native crash or out-of-memory (16 GB RAM, game uses the 12 GB layout, RAM was ~74% used before the slowdown).
- Changing settings in-game during the slowdown (Handheld, GPU accuracy Low, fence Balanced, DMA Unsafe) did not noticeably help.
- Log attached covers the whole session including the crash.
2) Black objects (fixed by a setting, tested on build 150)
- Some objects rendered fully black, as if they had zero lighting.
- The log showed six 3D textures that could not be allocated:
"AllocateImage: Image 1408x256x1008 (1 levels, 1 layers, format 133/143) does not fit; using an unbacked sparse image"
- Setting VRAM usage mode from Conservative to Aggressive fixed it (the RTX 3060 then reports 10.28 GiB available instead of 7 GiB). Useful tip for other NVIDIA 8-12 GB users; maybe the default for this title should be Aggressive.
How far they got
~1h25 session. Reached the Vi-O-La bike room, then the next area of the same building, where the game dropped to ~1 FPS and crashed.
Steps to reproduce
1. Play up to the room where the Vi-O-La bike is obtained.
2. Look at the area with the replicas: FPS drops to ~5, one CPU core at 100%, GPU ~18%.
3. Open the pause menu or scan visor: back to 60 FPS immediately.
4. Continue to the next area of the building: FPS drops to ~1, then the emulator crashes without an error.
Settings
Resolution: Res1X
GPU accuracy: High
Asynchronous shaders: true
VRAM usage: Aggressive. Precache shaders: Always. Async presentation: on. NVDEC: GPU. Scaling filter: FSR. Started in Docked mode. During the slowdown I tried in-game: Handheld mode, GPU accuracy Low, GPU fence behavior Balanced, DMA accuracy Unsafe (reverted) - no meaningful improvement, crash happened after these changes.
Tested on this setup
- Lichii build
- nx2-build-160 (Lichii Development Build)
- Build section
- Build 160
- Game version
- main build_id 8275FBE1EC5191C279F3A943AD8524F4BAB087A3
- CPU
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6C/12T)
- GPU
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB
- GPU driver
- 617.42 (32.0.16.1742)
- Operating system
- Windows 11 25H2 (build 26200)
- RAM
- 16Gb
- Graphics API
- Vulkan
