Im Playing dragon quest 8 using the latest svn, I'm trying to achieve full speed with no slowdowns on towns and battles,using 5x native scaling on internal d3d, I have the NTSC version . My hardware is an i7 2600k OC to 4.2 ghz and 2 gtx 580 in SLI, 8gb ram. And I'm able to have full speed if I use 4x scaling, should I get a new card (like the 680) or are there any options that can help me play at 5x scaling full speed,any suggestions? Anyone of you with similar hardware? Any feedback appreciated.

Is 5x really needed? I found that 3x is great already and 4x just a tiny bit better.

Try disabling one for better results;P. That + like above I think x5 from x4 gives you only placebo effect.

Anything above 4x is overkill. My AMD Penom II x4 965 and GTX 580 can easily run it at 3-4x with no speedhacks.

It really looks better at 5x, I'm playing o a 30 inch dell monitor, just wondering if the video card is the bottle neck on dq8 or is over clocking my CPU gonna be worth it?

Pcsx2 can't take advantage of SLI so the second video card won't do much, and its definitely a video card bottleneck since you can already hit full-speed with lower upscale (you would need to check in a program like nvidia inspector to see if its core or mem limiting it)

I agree with the others res 5x upscale is something like 2560 x 2240 resolution, kinda overkill.

To those of you who are saying that x5 and x6 is overkill....are you referring only to Dragon Quest? Because if not, I can tell you with 100% certainty that going from x3 to x5 in other games, specifically in Ridge Racer V and OutRun 2, makes a huge difference. RRV in particular looks like a whole new game and looks absolutely STUNNING at x6! I can't get 60fps with it at anything over x4, because I'm running an ATI 5870 but bot does it sure look good!

Depends on the game, some games are lower res natively so of course a higher res will look better, but some games use a higher res like 640x448 natively so you usually dont need to upscale as much.

In DQ8 I cant see any difference in quality going above 3x
4x
http://i46.tinypic.com/2lvi936.jpg
5x
http://i48.tinypic.com/4u6mac.jpg

6x is to much for my card

I make a similar post a long time ago, the conclusions that i arrive are:

1)the image "quality" depends a lot of the monitor and the person, for ME and my monitor i see the difference between x4 and x5 (in x5 the textures are a lot clear FOR ME, the aliasing difference is not THAT much, but the texture clarity is noticeable).

x3

x4

x5

*A Jpg image is not point of comparison, the compression of the format make the Imagen lost a lot of detail, if some 1 know a host that not convert to jpg i be glad to upload the shots there.

2) the higher resolution performance is affected by the vram and memory bandwidth (advantage for nvidia over AMD here if u are going to make a buy based on PCSX2 performance), i find my 580GTX with 3gb of ram enough to play at 5x mostly of the time at 60fps, the game have some slowdowns in the beginning and end of the fights but generally in the rest of the scenarios it works pretty ok, except the area near the casino, if u are referring to THAT slowdowns u are going to need IDK maybe a card with 300 GB/s memory bandwidth

*SLI/crossfire setups are not supported by the emu, there is no benefit on it.

so my point here is:
U don't need to make an upgrade with that card because the 680 and the 580 have the same memory bandwidth 192 GB/sec.

*Related question, is there any way to enhance the way that pscx2 is affected by the memory bandwidth of the cards vram?, i don't know how it works, and maybe is a really stupid question, but ey!, if i don't ask im never going to know the answer.

Well, sorry for my bad English it is not my natural language.

@Alethram When you use "allow 8 bit textures" in gsdx config, some games can decrease memory usage by alot, but often also increasing by alot gpu core load;], it's often great help, for my radeon HD5670 which has awfull memory bandwidth it can change loads of games from completely unplayable at native to full speed upscaled, as the gpu core load is always much smaller anyway, not sure if that could work with DQ as this game is generally gpu heavy.;]