Overclocking the EE (discussion) (testers wanted)

[ssakash]

Lol, GS is absolutely different from a normal GPU.

[Serial Hacker]

Lol, GS is absolutely different from a normal GPU.

i was trolling

on the other hand so is EE is monumentally different from modern day processing units.

[K.F]

So the advantage of this is that some games will run smoother, and I wouldn't call confusing users who don't read the PCSX2 documentation a disadvantage since they don't really care about the configuration in the first place and a slider that goes both ways won't affect them really.

It shouldn't be easy to activate though, maybe even hidden, to avoid confusing users.

For most people a hidden feature is a dead feature. Maybe we can add a tick mark that will allow the slider to go to both ways, even though I am opposed to the idea of dumbing down features just because some people might not know how to use them.

[Serial Hacker]

i hated the GSDX.ini modification for hardware hacks back in 0.9.8...

[Nobbs66]

The VU have only a basic timing implementation. Iit's been a while but I think they only spend some EE cycles on VIF events, not real timing at all.
You can decrease those cycles and it will change the behaviour in some games but the effect isn't really that of "speeding up the VUs".

Anyway, the actual EE overclock feature is a nice toy to play around with and I'm sure there's a couple popular games that will run much better
with this on (on a very fast pc, of course). It shouldn't be easy to activate though, maybe even hidden, to avoid confusing users.

Make us enter the konami code

[rama]

Well, I want the feature in a basic form (but easy to implement).
Our cycle counting isn't exact enough and we haven't found an idea yet on how to make it better.
(The problems are superscalar EE and unknown at recompile time memory latencies.)
By adding the overclock feature, I can better test and debug cycle counting.
I'm just not sure it should be exposed to regular users now. The feature can very easily lead
to misconfiguration when people try to "optimize" everything (and that's what we regularly see).

[Nobbs66]

Well, I want the feature in a basic form (but easy to implement).
Our cycle counting isn't exact enough and we haven't found an idea yet on how to make it better.
(The problems are superscalar EE and unknown at recompile time memory latencies.)
By adding the overclock feature, I can better test and debug cycle counting.
I'm just not sure it should be exposed to regular users now. The feature can very easily lead
to misconfiguration when people try to "optimize" everything (and that's what we regularly see).

Yeah, a lot of online guides for pcsx2 suck. We could maybe make a separate section in the GUI for beta features that is locked off with a password. I'm not exactly sure how secure this would be or how hard it is to implement, but I'm just throwing out ideas.

[willkuer]

What happens if you overclock EE and steal some of the overclocked clocks towards VU? Will EE and VU be more powerful?
Does it make sense what I am talking?

[masterotaku]

I also tested a build Blyss gave me. I could make Kingdom Hearts 2 run at real 120fps, using the 60fps patch and the half speed patch at the same time (I also had to set NTSC normal speed to 119.88fps). Without overclocking, the game is capped to 60fps 99% of the time because it can't reach 120fps.

There's also a big improvement in Shadow of the Colossus. I could see that the game tried to run at 60fps where it ran at 30fps before. I said "tried" because my CPU couldn't deliver those fps big part of the time, but I could see that the game wasn't repeating frames.

Once we have better CPUs in some years, this feature will make SotC a lot better.

PS: now Dolphin also has an overclocking and underclocking feature, from 6% to 400%. Glad to see more emulators adopt the overclocking possibility.

[dogen]

Increased VRAM ? high clocks ? Higher Memory Clocks ?

Games won't use more ram than what they're originally designe for and according to blyss the gs runs unlocked anyway.

What happens if you overclock EE and steal some of the overclocked clocks towards VU? Will EE and VU be more powerful?
Does it make sense what I am talking?

I don't think vu cycle stealing works like that. I'm pretty sure it's more like stealing cycles away from the vus. So if I understand it right it makes the emotion engine think they're running faster, but they aren't really.

There's also a big improvement in Shadow of the Colossus.

Makes sense, the game ran unlocked on the ps2, but rarely went above 30 fps.