How do I get Dragon Quest VIII to run (and look) decently ?

[Xeraser]

According to the wiki page you should be able to run the game without many slowdowns:
An old report from the PAL version:
"Full FPS nearly everywhere in 1280x1280 in Rev 2523. Oddly enough, 8-bit textures slow down the PAL version a little bit, so make sure to turn them off! All other hacks were turned on full blast (except VU skipping was only 2x)"

So be sure to enable speedhacks to improve performance.

I just checked the wiki and those tests were performed on a toaster from 1998. https://i.gyazo.com/6180241b4fad22b4ed95...906593.png

[jesalvein]

and they were also tested on a very old pcsx2 revision.
that's why

[willkuer]

So just to see any progress in this thread.... Can you please enable the title again?

[refraction]

and they were also tested on a very old pcsx2 revision.
that's why

and further to that, they had the speedhacks all fully on, meaning they were getting false FPS readings, so they were probably lying.

[FlatOut]

and further to that, they had the speedhacks all fully on, meaning they were getting false FPS readings, so they were probably lying.

Full speedhacks do actually help some demanding games run at real 50/60fps, don't just ignore it because it often has bad results.

[Xeraser]

I don't know what I did but I messed around a bit and I can now run it at fullspeed on both DX11 and OGL with these settings https://i.gyazo.com/f2cabecc527624b87c6e...5d0a7f.png
There seems to be a weird slowdown during scripted cutscenes (so far I only noticed it when King Trodan speaks to you before and after you sleep at the inn for the first time) but I'll mess around with the settings since I was just experimenting. I enabled the round sprite hack but the text still looks like absolute ass. https://i.gyazo.com/f9898ddee145733c7ea0...21d715.jpg (actually looks better in the screenshot)

EE% min is 20, max is 45. It averages at 30-40 in the overworld and 30-35 in battles if not less.
GS% min is 15, max is 35, averages at 20-30 in the overworld, 20-25 in battles if not less.

[dogen]

I don't know what I did but I messed around a bit and I can now run it at fullspeed on both DX11 and OGL with these settings https://i.gyazo.com/f2cabecc527624b87c6e...5d0a7f.png
There seems to be a weird slowdown during scripted cutscenes (so far I only noticed it when King Trodan speaks to you before and after you sleep at the inn for the first time) but I'll mess around with the settings since I was just experimenting. I enabled the round sprite hack but the text still looks like absolute ass. https://i.gyazo.com/f9898ddee145733c7ea0...21d715.jpg (actually looks better in the screenshot)

EE% min is 20, max is 45. It averages at 30-40 in the overworld and 30-35 in battles if not less.
GS% min is 15, max is 35, averages at 20-30 in the overworld, 20-25 in battles if not less.

Yeah.. Full blending is very slow, like the option says. And it's not only GPU heavy either, it'll hit your cpu hard with lots of extra draw calls. Unless the game really needs it turn it down a few notches. The game runs more than fullspeed on my pentium g3258. Your 3570k should be around the same.

[hye_phin]

TL;DR: Video. Settings.

I've been playing with DQ8 (NTSC) for a few days.

I'm running dev-589 from the buildbot. Graphics plugin: GSdx32-SSE4, OpenGL (Hardware).

Enable Widescreen Patches: Checked
Preset: 2 - Safe
MTVU: checked
Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Allow 8-bit Textures: Checked.
Internal Res: 3x Native
Tex Filtering: (Forced)

CRC Hack: Partial
Enable HW Hacks: Checked
    Skipdraw: 0
    Preload Data Frame: Checked
    Round Sprite: Full

Hardware Depth: Checked
Accurate Date: Checked
Blending Unit Accuracy: High

---

If the screen edge artifacts bother you, go into GS Window settings and adjust zoom to something > 100.30.

8-bit textures is a significant speedup in specific areas of the game (maybe NTSC specific?).
Forced filtering makes the fire and other effects prettier.

Skipdraw at 0 keeps shadows and lensflare/bloom effects looking great.
Preload Data Frame fixes a texture error I experienced in the first dungeon (the Waterfall Cave area) (see attached images). Note: Custom internal resolutions break this fix.
Round Sprite at Full gets rid of the text artifacts while minimizing the screen-edge artifacts.

This has fixed 99% of my issues with visuals so far. And the game looks fantastic. I even turned on Asmodean's shader; the defaults increase the color variations in the trees and skyboxes.

---

I've noticed two small issues, so far (I'm not very far into the game):

In the in-game menu, when selecting a character, there is a gold-glowing rectangle indicating your current selection. Anything above native res and a bit of this rectangle gets cut out of each side. (see attached image)
Setting tex offset to: 1000 0000 fixes this, but screws up other parts of the menu.

I get HUGE FPS drops when the sun comes into view, while trying to walk around. I think it has to do with calculating the bloom/lens flare effects. I'm not sure what the bottleneck is, though, because GS is very high (75%-90%) but it never hits 100%, and EE/VU stay below 50%. Meanwhile, speed drops to 70%-80% and ONE of my CPU cores shoots up from about 50% to 85%+ (never 100%). Maybe it's memory bandwidth? Lowering the internal res allows me to keep my frames up, but... I prefer to deal with the infrequent slowdown.

Update: Overclocking my VRAM by about 10% gave me +2 FPS, so I'm pretty sure that's my bottleneck (2GB GDDR5 @ 3004MHz).

I was going to update the wiki, but I wasn't sure where to start.

Current specs for posterity:
Intel i7 950, GTX 650 Ti Boost

16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

[Xeraser]

Yeah.. Full blending is very slow, like the option says. And it's not only GPU heavy either, it'll hit your cpu hard with lots of extra draw calls. Unless the game really needs it turn it down a few notches. The game runs more than fullspeed on my pentium g3258. Your 3570k should be around the same.

I seriously hope you DON'T know what you're talking about. The G3258 is not even in the same league as the 3570K. 
Ultra blending is the only one that runs below 60 FPS and cutscenes somehow fixed themselves now. Text still looks like ass.

[dogen]

I seriously hope you DON'T know what you're talking about. The G3258 is not even in the same league as the 3570K. 
Ultra blending is the only one that runs below 60 FPS and cutscenes somehow fixed themselves now. Text still looks like ass.

The g3258 has higher single threaded performance(around 10-15% for pcsx2 I think) than the 3570k at the same clock speed. I run mine at 4.2GHz, which would put it somewhere around a 3570k at 4.5-4.7GHz. It is in the same league for this emulator.

And if you check the pcsx2 benchmark, you'll see my petium matching a 4.8GHz 3570k.

94.77 FPS - SLUS 20672 - Intel Pentium G3258 - 4.2 GHz OC - dogen
94.68 FPS - SLUS 20672 - Intel Core i5 3570K - 4.8 GHz OC - Teufel9000