Help me get this figured it out... i've had this doubt for 3 years now
#1
Well, i'm literally stumped and decided it's about time i took the time to come here and post this issue.

First of all i'll post my specs:

CPU: Phenom II x4 955 BE@Default clock 3.2Ghz
Mem: Corsair Dominator x2 4GB
GPU: At the time it was an onboard ATi HD3300, but later i switched to a Nvidia GTX 580. Nowadays i've got a Nvidia GTX 760.

The problem is as follows... since back then (i'm talking 2010~2011 here) i was a Burnout afficionado and playad the burnout games on PCSX2 to the bone.
The games (Burnout Revenge, Takedown and Dominator) still had the blur stripes bug and the black sky bug, which were easily fixed by setting Skipdraw to 2 or 3 and pressing F9 to switch to software mode just before races, respectively.

At the time, the game still had performance problems and you still needed speedhakcs for it to run at Fullspeed. Fortunately, i remember the builds i was using and i remember i used 4133 build and the game ran always at Fullspeed when EE cycle hack was at 2 with VU cycle at 2. The game would randomly freeze with VU Cycle anything above 2 (it went up to 4).
Now it comes the crucial part, the thing is... the higher the EE and VU cycle went, the emulator was actually FASTER, that's right, it was like it was skipping 0,5 frames so to speak but it did felt faster, and this was with frameskipping disabled altogether. As you can imagine, games that ran really slow really benefitted from this, except maybe gran turismo which at EEx2 and VU1x ran Fullspeed except for the Night Opera, SS and Hong Kong stages (all the ones which use light sources). High VU cycles like 4 would also make some games freeze altogether and the graphics would turn out to bit a bit blocky, i guess it reduced the quality of everything thats why it was a bit faster, at least it looked like it was doing just like that.

Bottom line is, these speedhacks were really useful in games that were really slow.

However, nowadays when i try to enable EE and VU in current PCSX2 builds the emulator actually slows down the emulation..!? This can't be right. I'm really confused, did you guys messed with these speedhack or maybe it was me who messed up my VC runtimes 2005 up to 2012? Is this a common problem now, or is it just me having this slowdown when enabling high EE and VU speedhacks? Because it certainly wasn't like that back in the day.

Please help me understand this issue...




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#2
The speedhacks haven't changed.

However, as PCSX2 has become more accurate the hardware requirements have increased. I can just barely keep Burnout 3 at full speed on my FX 6300 @ 4.4 with EE cycle rate hack maxed.

Best bet: Enable MTVU, set EE cycle rate hack slider to 3, and don't mess with VU(it slows down Burnout games). That's the best you can do. Otherwise you can use an old build for more speed(but know that it will not be supported on the forums if you have issues)
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#3
It's slowing down because you're literally lowering the virtual clockspeed of the PS2. If a game is requiring more resources than the console can provide then it will cause slowdowns, but they won't be reported by the emulator.
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#4
Blyss i've fiddled with these games a lot. Burnout 3 even today can run at a reasonably speed if you set frameskip to 2/0 respectively. And as you said setting EE and VU to 1x and higher will slow down games, but it wasn't like that.

Isn't this actually the opposite of speedhacks? That's why i'm confused, back then, the higher the speedhack we set the faster the game would go, although it did skip frames and it certainly would freeze them at some point it felt like a speedhack.

I see, Nobbs, maybe that's the way it is now, i've also notice a lot more games are closer to the real thing and even burnout revenge which was reeeeeally slow on sunshine keys while in traffic attack (the first stage in the game to be precise) runs at fullspeed now with just a couple of "safe" hacks.

I was out of the PCSX2 scene for all these years, that's why i've felt the "shock" in performance when i got the latest build from orphis.



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#5
That's the way it's always been.

EE cyclerate hack works by lowering the core clock speed of the emulated EE. As a result, MOST games skip frames internally and become easier to emulate.

VU stealing hack works by altering the balance of "power" between EE and VU. E.G. VU stealing robs the EE of CPU time in order to do more VU stuff.

Either has ALWAYS had the possible effect of slowing down the game. The reason you notice it now more than then is as I said - hardware requirements have increased.
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#6
(01-06-2015, 05:43 PM)Blyss Sarania Wrote: That's the way it's always been.

EE cyclerate hack works by lowering the core clock speed of the emulated EE. As a result, MOST games skip frames internally and become easier to emulate.

VU stealing hack works by altering the balance of "power" between EE and VU. E.G. VU stealing robs the EE of CPU time in order to do more VU stuff.

Either has ALWAYS had the possible effect of slowing down the game. The reason you notice it now more than then is as I said - hardware requirements have increased.

That must be it... the emulator has improved but my CPU stood still. Guess i'll need to upgrade to a a new CPU to keep up or stick to the old, faster but buggy builds.



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#7
(01-06-2015, 07:54 PM)akatana Wrote: That must be it... the emulator has improved but my CPU stood still. Guess i'll need to upgrade to a a new CPU to keep up or stick to the old, faster but buggy builds.
you can take a look at my sig if, you are planning to make a new custom build for pcsx2.
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#8
I would also suggest to use the stable releases over the development stuff since they run a bit faster.
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