Strange slowdowns with Nocturne

[Bright-Warrior]

Hey guys,

I have a small question and maybe a bug report. But because I'm not sure about this, I wanted to ask this in the forum.

I'm currently playing Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne/Lucifer's Call (PAL) on the recent version of the svn. This is my first playthrough, because the game was suffering from bad geometries and clip through geometries. Just the shadows are still behaving this way, so thumps up for this^^!
Anyway, I recently saw some strange slowdowns which I couldn't really explain to me. I made some screenshots to show what I mean:

1) http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/8910/no...owdown.png

I used the PAl setting with 50 fps by the way. I'm just mentioning this, because the other screenshot is with 60 fps, I wanted to try NTSC again. But what is curious about this slowdown is, that neither the EE (63%) nor the GS (28%) are that much used to slow down the game like this. I mean, this scene lacked about 15 fps. Usually a slowdown occurred for me when the EE was near the 100% (never got GS that far^^). I do also have no console output at this scene, so I have no real idea what this could be. Except my HDD could cause this slowdown, since this is not shown a the top of the window. Do you guys know if this could be a PCSX2 bug or just something "normal".

2) http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/8317/...owdown.png

At this screen I used NTSC, so the max should be 60 fps. But as before, I got less and don't know why^^.

[rama]

The usage meter isn't 100% exact science. It's likely missing some information there.
Try to check native res in GSdx and see if it helps. If not, you're cpu limited in some way.

[abdo123]

well use frame skipping in gs it might help too

[Bright-Warrior]

The usage meter isn't 100% exact science. It's likely missing some information there.
[...]

OK, then it makes sense. I first thought this would be some bug in PCSX2, since I use the recent SVN to play. But I was unsure and did not want to create bugreport for nothing^^.

The slowdowns are not occurring often and are almost only in cutscenes, which is no problem for me. I know that my rig isn't powerful enough to emulate perfectly, so I'm rather surprised that the rest of the game is running so well^^.

[Shadow Lady]

Usually when neither EE/GS hit 100% it's probably too high internal resolution, "native" in GSdx and "Allow 8-bit textures" could help there.

You're also right, your HDD could cause that EE/GS not hitting ~90% but it's not likely in static scenes like those.