FFXII menu slowdown only on d3d11

[ffm_strife]

Ok, first of all my specs:

i7 2,4Ghz
Gt550m2gb
16gb ram
64bit SO

I know it's a pretty borderline pc but the issue is kinda weird, FFXII works flawlessly at 2x (enough for me and menus work fine) but, on the other hand, using 3x or custom higher res (using d3d11), game keeps working flaslessly at 60fps BUT menu fps go crazy and get to 30fps, that would seem pretty normal but (big but) if I switch to directx9 menu works fine (60 fps d3d9) but then the game doesn't work ok... main cities get 40-45fps.

So... is it normal? I mean, there's no way to get the 60fps on menus with dx9 using dx11? shouldn't the menu be faster if the game works faster with dx11? I'm extremely confused and I hope someone can give me a clue about what's going on.

No need to say I'm cool playing it at 2x, it's more a curious thread than a huge performance issue.

[Koji]

I won't lie to you and say I fully understand why in some games the menu kills the FPS, but FFX has been known to do this as well as a few others. It may be that the game is redrawing the menu graphics every frame or something silly like that and it just gobbles up video memory bandwidth like no tomorrow. DX11 might have slightly more overhead in that situation and thus it all adds up... but again, I don't really know.

If you want to play with minimal slow downs in the menu for FFX, you can always temporarily switch to software mode each time you enter it (F9 I do believe) then switch back when you're done. Or you can set audio from "time stretch" to "async". The menus won't go any faster, but the audio will no longer slow down when it happens, and in menus you aren't likely to notice.

[ffm_strife]

The audio fix is gonna be helpful, thanks a lot!

On the other hand, is there any reason why gs stays at 30%, EE 25%, and the other 2 at 3-1% while the menu is at 30 fps, shouldn't one of those be at 99%? or I'm confused.

[miseru99]

GS is graphic chip, but GS% shows only GS thread on cpu;p if you use software mode that % shows all work of emulated gs chip, but in hardware it only shows the portion made on CPU(yeah hardware still has to use it as well;p), since when you get gpu limited GS% doesn't really show it. Basically all those % show cpu threads, that's all PCSX2 informs us, the rest we can only guess based on that and external programs.

Anyway for FFXII menu try to mess around with "allow 8 bit textures" option, basically and depending on the game/scene it decreases memory bandwidth usage, increasing gpu core usage in other words switching out your gpu different limitations. Can be as much of a slowdown as a speedup, if I recall this option turned ON was actually lagging FFXII menus, but it might been different for different gpu's as well, anyway try changing this option(in gsdx config ofc) to opposite you had it and check the results.

Why stuff lags when it doesn't seem heavy? Emulation has a minimum of one additional factor it's the difference between things done on emulated console and pc native stuff. Totally virtual, made up examples to show it better:
1) An ultra heavy ps2 scene which works exactly same as on pc.
2) An ultra light ps2 scene which seems to be impossible on pc.
If you check by eye the second one could look easy to render yea? But in reality the first would just be a crappy over 10yo graphics which integrated chip can get without warming up while the second could lag at best on latest top end gpu even at native res.

Sad reality. Or wait, maybe not soo sad, since that's what making it interesting and powers up whole scene around it;p, "pc in a box" aka xbox has no love in emulation at all xD.