Core i7 notebooks and pcsx2: SLOW

[Xellon]

Just post here or PM.

Post everything here. I'm very curious as to the results after all

[Ulundill]

Just want to say that I have a 1.7GHz i7 in my Asus G51J series notebook and with enough tweaking I can get Tales of the Abyss to run with pretty much constant 65fps. I'm using the most recent beta, and I have a slightly older version of Gsdx to get rid of the annoying ghosting problem abyss has if you set the res higher than native. For speed hacks I have 1.5x cycle rate, for misc I have all of them on, and for VU I have status on and slight speed up for cycle stealing. Hope this helps.

[shoegazer]

Just want to say that I have a 1.7GHz i7 in my Asus G51J series notebook and with enough tweaking I can get Tales of the Abyss to run with pretty much constant 65fps. I'm using the most recent beta, and I have a slightly older version of Gsdx to get rid of the annoying ghosting problem abyss has if you set the res higher than native. For speed hacks I have 1.5x cycle rate, for misc I have all of them on, and for VU I have status on and slight speed up for cycle stealing. Hope this helps.

Some games run faster than others. For example I'm pretty sure I can get Kingdom Hearts and a handful of others to run at fullspeed on the Core i7 too, but most games run far slower than that; whereas on my c2d even the more demanding games run faster. That's why I'm sticking to games like Tekken 4 to do my comparisons. I don't have Tales of the Abyss, so I really don't know how demanding that game is.

Can you do me favor and try Tekken 4 (if you have it) and let me know what you find? If you can get it to run at anything beyond 35fps in fights, I'll be very curious what you did. Also, can you tell me what tweaking you did exactly to get better results?

I'm sending the notebook back tomorrow (Monday) so if you have anything today I'd be very interested. Thanks!

[fischkopf]

Just don't waste your money on i7 processors, they suck
i'm still happy with my old e8400.

[decode1984]

The problem isn't with the processor technology. Intel Core i5-i7's are AMAZING CPU's. Far superior to Core 2 Duo and Quads. The main problem here lies on what platform these CPU's are running in. My i5-750 smokes almost every game I have tried in PCSX2. But I have the desktop version of the processor. The clock speed is significantly higher. PCSX2 is heavily reliant on clock speeds. The mobile Core i7 is indeed a quad core CPU, but it has a low clock rate. Not to mention given to previous posts on this topic, there are issues with the regulation of the speeds. Mobile CPU's will always have a lower clock rate than their desktop counterparts due to heat and battery life. Not saying that lower clock rate is a bad thing, because I am sure that the Mobile Core i7 CPU kicks major butt in PC applications/games. I think that if the Bios was optimized with Speedstep/Turbo Boost technology efficiently, then PCSX2 would run better on these Core i7 mobile CPU's.

[Ulundill]

Unfortunatley im still in the process of finding Tekken 4, if I can find it in time ill post the results. But for ToA as I said I had Cycle rate at x1.5 all the misc EEhacks on the status flag hack on for vu hacks and slight speed up for cycle stealing. Im using Gsdx r1354 sse 4.1 because that revision gets rid of the ghosting problem with ToA. I have the internal res set to 1204 X and Y. I'm using the most recent SPU2-X 1.3.0 beta. And I have the Frame limiter at 65.

And I tried with Shadow of the Colossus jut to see if it worked for other games. I'm not sure how demanding SotC is but with the most recent Gsdx, set to the same internal res all I had to do was change the Cycle rate to 2x and but vu cycle stealing to moderate speed up and I could run it at a pretty well. I had constant 60-65 fps on horse back and around 70-78 fps on foot. There was the ocassional bad speed down, in the fight with the colossus, I hit 38 fps, but that only lasted litterally 2 seconds, before jumping back up to 70. For some reason though the game still seemed to run a little choppy, not sure if that has something to do with the speed hacks, or just the game it's self, I dont ever remember SotC being that smooth of a game when I played it on my PS2.

[Xellon]

Ulundill

What kind of video card does your laptop have?

[decode1984]

He has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M GPU with 1GB GDDR3 memory.

[Ulundill]

Exactly what decode said.

[Ulundill]

ok info in on tekken 4 with VERY suprising results. Same settup as before, most recent GSDX internal res at 1024 X and Y. Speed hacks were 2x cycle rate, All misc EE hacks, Satus flag hack and moderate cycle stealing for VU hacks.

Tekken 4 ran better than any of the other games I tested. I had frame limiter off just to see how high it could go. I was getting pretty much constant 75-80 fps, it was odd though, the first fight was 60-65, then after that it shot up to 75-80, i guess that was the cpu overclocking. Just a thought, I remember someone saying if the cpu gets to hot, it stops overclocking, im using a laptop fan, might that help?

Sorry for the late update, I couldn't get Tekken 4 until now.

Oh and I forgot to mention I was using Pcsx2 r2186 for Tekken 4.