04-19-2010, 06:39 PM
Hi everybody,
I actually felt a bit nostalgic about Midnight Club 3 and felt like playing some so I plugged my PS2 to the TV (Full HD 32" LCD) and damn! That looks so ugly!
I don't know why but Midnight Club 3 looks really bad on the PS2, it was ok on a CRT TV but I just can't get past that much aliasing on the LCD.
Burnout 3 doesn't look so aliased, I don't know why...
So I thought I would give it a try on PCSX2 since it seems a reasonable amount of games are decently playable now and I could possibly get better graphics.
But unfortunately, no matter what settings I choose, I can't get it to play right, now I know it is stated as "Ingame" in the compatibility list, which doesn't mean you'll get decent performance but I saw these 2 threads which seem to state it does play alright :
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Bug-Repor...night+club
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Post-your...re?page=25
But in my case, if I use GSdx in software mode it will work but pretty slow (around 20fps with lowest settings), playable but not enjoyable.
With the DX9 or 10 hardware mode (I'm using PCSX2 r1888 with march plugins, GSdx SSE41 r2693 but I tried with the official release with much the same results), I can go through the menus and even start a race with very good performance even with very high settings (I have a C2D 3.0GHz, GF8800GTS 384MB, 4GB DDR2) but whenever I start accelerating, the game kind of freezes, actually the framerate drops to 1fps or less (depending on the graphic settings but 1fps is with the lowest settings) as long as the car goes fast, when it decelerates it gets back to 50fps.
And if I actually start and stop the car and back again without getting past around 20mph, the fps stays around 50fps.
Now with ZeroGS (march plugins), the game is plagued with graphic inconsistencies (bright lights, transparent car, etc.) and it's much slower than GSdx even with the lowest settings, I don't know if that is usually the case...
But what is interesting is that it has the same kind of behaviour as GSdx with the default settings : when you get past 20mph, the framerate drops significantly although not as much as with GSdx : around 6fps according to the counter but I would believe it to be more around 2-3fps.
But then if you activate the "No target CLUT 00001000" option (which is supposed to be for Resident Evil 4 or foggy scenes), it gets much better, the framerate still drops but stays between 12 and 26fps with the car at full speed which I guess is normal considering the additional calculations.
Now I have tried to get a decent performance with either software mode or ZeroGS but I couldn't improve it much with all the speedhacks and CPU settings and different (older) versions of both plugins so it is still not really playable.
I also tried ZZogl but the graphics are completely messed up, it just goes sunshine bright and merges all the images.
So is there something I could do to make it work with GSdx hardware mode? Some hidden settings or something or is it a problem with my setup (software/hardware) maybe?
Oh and limiting frames didn't seem to help when it's as low as 1fps.
Thanks for any help and sorry for writing a book out of it
I actually felt a bit nostalgic about Midnight Club 3 and felt like playing some so I plugged my PS2 to the TV (Full HD 32" LCD) and damn! That looks so ugly!
I don't know why but Midnight Club 3 looks really bad on the PS2, it was ok on a CRT TV but I just can't get past that much aliasing on the LCD.
Burnout 3 doesn't look so aliased, I don't know why...
So I thought I would give it a try on PCSX2 since it seems a reasonable amount of games are decently playable now and I could possibly get better graphics.
But unfortunately, no matter what settings I choose, I can't get it to play right, now I know it is stated as "Ingame" in the compatibility list, which doesn't mean you'll get decent performance but I saw these 2 threads which seem to state it does play alright :
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Bug-Repor...night+club
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Post-your...re?page=25
But in my case, if I use GSdx in software mode it will work but pretty slow (around 20fps with lowest settings), playable but not enjoyable.
With the DX9 or 10 hardware mode (I'm using PCSX2 r1888 with march plugins, GSdx SSE41 r2693 but I tried with the official release with much the same results), I can go through the menus and even start a race with very good performance even with very high settings (I have a C2D 3.0GHz, GF8800GTS 384MB, 4GB DDR2) but whenever I start accelerating, the game kind of freezes, actually the framerate drops to 1fps or less (depending on the graphic settings but 1fps is with the lowest settings) as long as the car goes fast, when it decelerates it gets back to 50fps.
And if I actually start and stop the car and back again without getting past around 20mph, the fps stays around 50fps.
Now with ZeroGS (march plugins), the game is plagued with graphic inconsistencies (bright lights, transparent car, etc.) and it's much slower than GSdx even with the lowest settings, I don't know if that is usually the case...
But what is interesting is that it has the same kind of behaviour as GSdx with the default settings : when you get past 20mph, the framerate drops significantly although not as much as with GSdx : around 6fps according to the counter but I would believe it to be more around 2-3fps.
But then if you activate the "No target CLUT 00001000" option (which is supposed to be for Resident Evil 4 or foggy scenes), it gets much better, the framerate still drops but stays between 12 and 26fps with the car at full speed which I guess is normal considering the additional calculations.
Now I have tried to get a decent performance with either software mode or ZeroGS but I couldn't improve it much with all the speedhacks and CPU settings and different (older) versions of both plugins so it is still not really playable.
I also tried ZZogl but the graphics are completely messed up, it just goes sunshine bright and merges all the images.
So is there something I could do to make it work with GSdx hardware mode? Some hidden settings or something or is it a problem with my setup (software/hardware) maybe?
Oh and limiting frames didn't seem to help when it's as low as 1fps.
Thanks for any help and sorry for writing a book out of it