Performance questions about Snowblind games
#1
Hi everybody.

First of all, thank you to anyone who is involved in this project for your awesome work. It's just great to be able to be play old games like that so simply.


I have a question concerning performance issues in some games that happen to use the Snowblind engine like Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath.

With a friend, we started playing Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance a few weeks ago and the game is playable. In Hardware mode we get 50 FPS (it's the PAL version) most of the time. However sometimes it drops to 40 and even sometimes 30 FPS in some areas. I tried tweaking the configurations for quite some time and I think I was able to find the best possible config to for this game. 


Here' the computer we're using :

Archlinux with Liquorix kernel
Nvidia GTX 670 with drivers 364.19
Intel® Core™ i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz × 4

So as you can see, it's not the most powerful computer ever but it's also not completely *****. Would it improve the situation if I bought a new GPU ? a new CPU ? Would it bring something to overclock my GPU ? Or is just a code optimization issue and the best I can do is to wait for you guys to continue your great work and it will get better ?

I don't know if I could get better performances on Windows using the DX10 plugin.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer me
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#2
Could you post some screenshots of GSdx configuration.

In order to achieve the best performance, you must enable 8 bits texture and the fast texture invalidation hack. The hack is available on latest git (but not in 1.4)

Quote: I don't know if I could get better performances on Windows using the DX10 plugin.
On this engine, OpenGL is nearly 2 times faster !
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#3
(05-29-2016, 11:17 AM)gregory Wrote: Could you post some screenshots of GSdx configuration.

In order to achieve the best performance, you must enable 8 bits texture and the fast texture invalidation hack. The hack is available on latest git (but not in 1.4)

On this engine, OpenGL is nearly 2 times faster !

Thank you for answering so quickly !


8 bit textures and texture invalidation were both already enabled as you can see :

   

   

   
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#4
Hum I won't max speedhack on the core as the slowdown comes from gsdx.

Try to crank up accurate blending a little. It is sometimes faster at the first level.
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#5
(05-29-2016, 12:06 PM)gregory Wrote: Hum I won't max speedhack on the core as the slowdown comes from gsdx.

Try to crank up accurate blending a little. It is sometimes faster at the first level.


Setting accurate blending to "basic" got me a few more FPS. In areas where it would drop 27-30 it now only drops to 35. I also compiled the latest git revision. Should I enable large framebuffer ?

Is there anything else I could try ?


I guess my hardware just isn't powerful enough to get a stable 50 FPS
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#6
Honestly the issue isn't really the hardware but the game. I would need to profile a slow scene, and find the root cause of the issue. Not sure it will be fixable. Your best bet will be to overclock your CPU to 4GHz+. 4Ghz ought to be safe. And it will provide you a boost of 17% (so 35fps => 40fps).

Oh by the way, the fast invalidation hack isn't enabled. You need to check "enable user hack". And it is likely a bad idea to disable depth emulation (speed impact is likely small on this engine).
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#7
^Might get a bit of a boost by disabling MTVU as well

Not so relevant to this topic, but if you play other games using software rendering, they might perform better with 2 - 3 extra rendering threads (compared to 10).
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#8
(05-29-2016, 05:00 PM)gregory Wrote: Honestly the issue isn't really the hardware but the game. I would need to profile a slow scene, and find the root cause of the issue. Not sure it will be fixable. Your best bet will be to overclock your CPU to 4GHz+. 4Ghz ought to be safe. And it will provide you a boost of 17% (so 35fps => 40fps).

Oh by the way, the fast invalidation hack isn't enabled. You need to check "enable user hack". And it is likely a bad idea to disable depth emulation (speed impact is likely small on this engine).

I can't believe I didn't see fast invalidation wasn't actually enabled... thanks. This made me gain a few more FPS.

(05-29-2016, 05:22 PM)Dreadmoth Wrote: ^Might get a bit of a boost by disabling MTVU as well

Not so relevant to this topic, but if you play other games using software rendering, they might perform better with 2 - 3 extra rendering threads (compared to 10).

This also made gain a few more FPS. Weird. It's recommended for CPU with more than 3 cores.



Thank you guys. Now it reaches 50 FPS in in areas where it usually dropped to 40. And now it apparently never drops below 40 FPS which is already WAY better than 25-30. The feeling is overall much better.

Thanks a lot for helping. I guess I won't be able to get much better performance than this.


EDIT : and Champions of Norrath is smooth as silk now ! thank you so much guys and keep up with the good work !
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#9
Haha Gregory I see my last comment about user hacks made you update the Linux GUI Biggrin (yes I look at the git everyday). Glad I could be of some use... See ya Wink
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#10
You read the option in the wrong way. You need 4 core to enable mtvu. It isn't enable me if you have more than 3 cores. Some games are faster with mtvu but not all.

It remains overclocking to gain an extra 5 fps, and it will be near perfect

Edit: I had wanted to it before I saw your first post. It was just a remainder and I didn't want to do massive work this week end. So yeah GUI is nicer now.
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