Occasional slowdowns in Smackdown Vs Raw 2010.
#1
I have slowdown problems with Smackdown Vs Raw 2010.
I have tried with and without VU cycle stealing but no difference.

Was playing SVR2010 and I had an fps of about 60 (50 is default PAL) with disabled frame limiting, enabled it to 45 (want a slower pace) but occasionally (a couple of minutes apart) the game freezes quickly, sound stops and fps drops to about 30 which gives a quite disturbing lag.

Is this slowdown a usual known problem?


My specs:
i7 720QM @ 1.6GHz TURBO BOOST @ 2.8GHz
6GB RAM
NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 230M

I find that going into the task manager and selecting 2 specific cores (that don't have the same physical core) to run the emu on optimizes the performance of PCSX2 for me. I have also killed all other apps running to make sure the boost kicks in on those two cores. I can't disable hyper threading since there is no BIOS option for this sadly.
Also I found that using the US NTSC 1.6 version BIOS gave me a higher framerate than v2.0 or the PAL 1.6.

Some settings:
EE/IOP
EE: Recompiler
IOP: Recompiler
Advanced
Round Mode: Nearest
Clamping Mode: Normal
Flush to Zero: V
Denormals are Zero: V

VUs
VU0: superVU Recompiler
VU1: superVU Recompiler
Advanced
Round Mode: Chop/Zero
Clamping Mode: Normal
Flush to Zero: V
Denormals are Zero: V

GS
Framelimiter
Base Framerate: 100%
Slow motion: 50%
Turbo: 200%
NTSC: 59.94FPS
PAL: 45FPS (I run the game in PAL mode)
Frameskipping disabled

I have tried different texture sizes but I get the same lag no matter if I run with native or high textures.

Actually just getting the sound to keep going even though the game would lag a little could probably be enough for me, the sound stopping for 1/4 of a second is really disturbing. I managed this by disabling the timing but then the sound of moves came 2 seconds too late and that doesn't work either.

Any suggestions?
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#2
okay assuming that you own 3 playstations 2,i can tell you that those slowdowns are beacuse of the turbo boost thing
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#3
So you are sure about it being the Turbo Boost?

In that case that sucks big time. I wonder how I could get past that problem. I know I can run it on three cores at worse performance that perhaps will keep the boost more stable, perhaps keeping the cpu colder by additional cooling would also help...

Anyone know of a good program to use for giving stats on the status of the CPU? Temperature, load and so on that I could run at the same time of running the game to get a better view of what is happening.

But you are "sure" about this?
Is this a problem others have experienced with the Turbo Boost?

Any tip on the sound thing btw? Any way to not make the sound just stop?
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#4
Diegochiha may indeed have hit the target's fly. Because of the way PCSX2 runs EE and GS and they are pipelined. For example EE amy be running near 100% and it would activate the turbo feature but GS may be something around 30% and the combined result seen as the average, fooling the turbo mechanism.

The best would be actually force the CPU to run constantly at the turbo speed while playing, BTW some actual overclock on the selected core or something alike. The nominal speed is too low to give playable results even in the most lighter games.
Imagination is where we are truly real
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#5
Yeah I know.

Problem is that I cannot enable/disable hyperthreading, overclock or anything on my computer. Should be available in BIOS but no options there whatsoever. Even chatted with a support dude that just said it wasn't possible on the computer, even though the CPU should support disabling cores/hyperythreading and so on...

But as I also said, without the sound stop I could probably live with it. Any tips?
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#6
And if what you say Nosasib is correct is there something I can do to make GS go more than 30%?

My own idea was that it switches off turbo since the CPU is getting too hot (Turbo works that way, heat level being one of the considered factors for turbo)...
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#7
There's nothing you can do to fix this problem. It is a problem experienced by all Core i7 Mobile (laptop) users to some degree -- some laptop models exhibit it worse than others. There are fundamental flaws in how Intel designs the Speedstep feature of their mobile CPUs, and while you can try all kinda of bizarre crap to get around them, ultimately the CPU will win and you will be stuck wondering why you paid a lot of money for a CPU that refuses to run at the speed it was built to run at.
Jake Stine (Air) - Programmer - PCSX2 Dev Team
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#8
Right. Essentially you bought a 1.6Ghz cpu, no matter what.

I advise you to search for some tool that forces the turbo mode.
Be it a BIOS setting or an "overclock" or whatever.
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#9
Oh my crap. That was sad to hear. Wish I knew that about a week ago. Damnit.
I had similar problems on my old dual core laptop aswell (framerate drops in intervals) that did not have turbo but it could never run the game at full speed anyway.
The BIOS I have on the computer does not have any settings for this stuff at all sadly (TURBO/HyperThreading).

The support dude I chatted with said that the motherboard did not support changing anything, can that be correct or would a modded BIOS perhaps be able to add the options? I don't exactly trust what he said since he didn't seem to know really much when I chatted with him.

But anyway. Why does the sound STOP for a while? It seems like the emulation actually stops for a short time before it goes back to full speed again.
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This is just mental... Just installed CPU-Z. While running it I never got one of these FPS drops... Strange.
I can also see that the overclocing works. It's about 2.2-2.4 inmatch.
Since starting to run CPU-Z the slowdowns suddenly stopped and still hasn't come back... How strange?!?!
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#10
I'm sorry for posting again but this thing is just driving me nuts.

How come the fps drops just vanished???

They did after I installed and ran CPU-Z. I will see when I get home from work if I'm still as lucky today but is there anyone that has a clue on what COULD have caused this?

Could it be that the program monitoring the CPU in some way makes the Turbo more stable? Or was it not the turbo that caused the drops in the first place? I've no clue...

Also, has anyone else tried CPU-Z?
The MHz value shown says that it is for core #0. However, If I assign PCSX2 to thread 4 & 6 I can see that the load of the program is moved to those threads. The MHz of core #0 is still the same though. Is core #0 in CPU-Z in this case some kind of average and not the MHz of actual core #0?
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