So I was testing things out and playing around in Grand Theft Auto Vice city Stories. I have an i7 so software rendering is viable for me on my system.

This is my whole system.

Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.8GHz
4GB DDR3
ATi Radeon HD 4850

I'm using PCSX2 revising r1888. It's the latest official beta using the old gui. I have gsdx version 1650.

So at first I was playing with gsdx set to software, with it rendering on six threads. I decided to switch over to hardware. As soon as I swicthed over to hardware I immediately noticed that my frame rate dropped by like 20fps. This was with gsdx set to native so it was rendering everything that software mode had to render. I swicthed back to software to double check and yes I was getting lower framerates at the specific area I was in. In other areas the frame rate would sky rocket though, like in stores and other places, but I was surprised that there are actually situations where software beats hardware.


Can anyone explain why this might happen?

Here are some screenshots as proof

Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories Software Rendering


Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories Hardware Rendering

Several scenes in several games are faster in software than hardware on my Quad. But then again, native resolution isn't usually a good comparison base, since upping internal res in HW mode rarely impacts performance (unless your video card sucks or you use very very high internal resolutions) and the visual quality is often magnitudes better.

So yea, I still prefer HW in any game that doesn't require SW for performance reasons.

I agree with that, even in games that you get small glitches Hardware with higher resolution generally looks better. As for this game I think someone before mentioned software worked better for it and as Jake already mentioned there's more games that behave like this is no biggie, would be interesting tho if this was the case for all your games.