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Sorry if it's gonna sound dumb but...
I tested this game with a few revisions, including older playground builds, pcsx2 0.9.4, 0.9.5 and the recent pcsx2 r548. And after playing around with the options on some various revisions and not been able to reach a stable or acceptable frame rate, a thing just passed through my mind. If some of the devs could answer I'll be very gratefull.
Question is: Does this game have an internal frameskip engine or something?
Again, sorry if it sounds dumb, but this thing just came to my mind after some observation. Thanks very much in advance. And sorry for my poor english.
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02-22-2009, 02:23 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-22-2009, 02:23 AM by rodiablo.)
Thanks for the help, but it doesn't help me too much 'cos I've already tried all the things you mentioned and thats not the point.
All I want to know is if the game has or not a internal frameskiper.
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02-22-2009, 05:12 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-22-2009, 07:35 AM by Air.)
Yup. It has an internal frameskipper. That's why it works "kinda" well with the X3 speedhack. It fools the emulated Playstation2 state of Pcsx2 into thinking it's running too slow to keep up (ie, it makes the vsyncs happen much faster from the perspective of the PS2), so the frameskipper starts skipping. Although I'm sure the frameskipper in SotC was intended for the few scenes n the game that actually run less than 60fps on the PS2 itself, and not as a neat hack for a general speedup in emulators.
Many other games have built in framelimiters, which do something similar to many old SNES console games. If they can't finish rendering a frame in time, they just skip the vsync flip and slow the whoe game down (video, logic, everything). On those games, X3 sync hack will increase the Gsdx-reported FPS, but the game itself will actually still be running slowly, visually speaking.
Other games have neither limiter or skipper. On those, X3 hack usually causes missing gemoetry. The missing gemoetry being whatever didn't get rendered before the vsync happened.
Jake Stine (Air) - Programmer - PCSX2 Dev Team
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And that's how I got schooled >.>. Guess I should have known better lol I noticed that happening on the actual PS2 for certain scenes that were too graphically intense. I'm assuming once everything is said and done the INT hack will cause the same speedup as the x3 cycle hack for SoC?
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Oh, so after all, my assumption was right. The game has an internal frameskipper indeed. I thought I was getting crazy about the strange behavior of this game on pcsx2. Thanks very much for clearing things up, Jake. And keep up the great work.
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Awesome thread. I've noticed that too but who could've thought... ) Any other game u know with frameskip? )
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None of the games I own have a frameskipper, except for SotC. But besides what Jake said, the internal frameskipper is a double-edged sword. Unless you run the game with the "Normal" or "Limit" cpu speed checked and have a powerfull machine to run at that normal/limit, you'll get crazy trying to configure the pcsx2 frameskip/vuskip parameter. I didn't try after Jake's explanation, but as I said in the first post, I had a hard time trying to put this game to run before (I was aware about the X3 hack), and after confirming my "internal frameskipper" assumption, I don't think it will be easier to do so.
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Pentium Dual Core E5300@4GHz by AKASA Nero
Nvidia 9600GT XFX stock
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Sorry for my bad english.