Strange thing about Shadow of the Colossus
#1
Hello there :3
Out of curiosity, I decided to emulate Shadow of the Colossus tonight and it went surprisingly well.
However, I noticed something weird: during supposed slowdowns (emu's output framerate decrease, EE percentage peaks), game doesn't seem to be slowing down, but its engine is skipping frames instead, keeping the full speed even in most demanding places. Is it supposed to be that way? It's rather interesting.

My PC specs are:
Phenom X3 2.3GHz
HD4870
4 gigs of DDR2-800 RAM.

PCSX2 1.0.0
Settings used: DirectX 10
Native resolution
EE Cycle Rate 2
VU Cycle Stealing 2
MTVU disabled
and pretty much everything else that is recommended in the wiki like aggressive-CRC to decrease bloom.
I have NTSC version of the game.

Thank you :3
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#2
sorry, we don't provide support for antique pcsx2 versions.
CPU : AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
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GPU : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
RAM : 16 Go
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#3
Lol "antique" Tongue2

Upgrade to the latest version on our site.

And yes what you describe is pretty normal. SotC drops frames on a real PS2 because of how demanding it is.
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Gaming Rig: Intel i7 6700k @ 4.8Ghz | GTX 1070 TI | 32GB RAM | 960GB(480GB+480GB RAID0) SSD | 2x 1TB HDD
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#4
Wait, since when 1.0.0 is antique? I mean, I understand that being said about 0.9.6 and 0.9.8, but 1.0.0 is already pretty reliable and runs well too.
And besides, I doubt that updating from 1.0.0 to 1.2.1 will change anything major, will it? And I use fairly up to date plugins too, so it shouldn't be a problem either.
But alright, I'll update it, if you insist. Even though I don't see a point in doing that, since plugin versions are pretty much what matters the most and they're independent from main PCSX2's version.
Back to the topic, I am aware that Shadow of the Colossus is rather unstable on PS2 as well, but is that dynamic frameskip is some sort of the engine feature to compensate for the lack of PS2s power to run this game properly?
I noticed that it reacts to EE Cycle Stealing since when I had it on 3 it was skipping all over the goddamn place so I changed it to 2 for less choppy performance.
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#5
Yeah, the frameskipping is in the engine. The EE cycle rate hack lowers the effective clock frequency of the EE. So turning it on gives the game less power on the emulated EE, so it skips more.

And, by rule we only support the latest version of PCSX2 on the forums, to keep things consistent. You are welcome to use whatever version you like, but only 1.2.1 and the git builds from buildbot.orphis.net are supported.
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#6
(09-16-2014, 02:52 AM)Blyss Sarania Wrote: Yeah, the frameskipping is in the engine. The EE cycle rate hack lowers the effective clock frequency of the EE. So turning it on gives the game less power on the emulated EE, so it skips more.

And, by rule we only support the latest version of PCSX2 on the forums, to keep things consistent. You are welcome to use whatever version you like, but only 1.2.1 and the git builds from buildbot.orphis.net are supported.

Supporting only latest version is rather unreasonable and very much so. Many questions on the forums aren't even related to PCSX2's version at all, but could be more related to version of plugins a certain someone is using. And since plugin versions and PCSX2 version are independent and interchangeable, it could be more appropriate to count plugin versions in too instead of counting only main program's version.
But anyway, thanks for the answer. I'm really pleased that there has been a dynamic frameskip implemented into an engine, thanks to it I can play Shadow of the Colossus quite nicely.
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#7
We support only the latest plugins too. And here is why:

Guy A comes on the forums with 0.9.8, and has a problem that has been fixed in 1.2.1. Why should we waste time trying to help this guy, when the problem was already fixed?

Guy B comes on to the forum with 1.0.0 and has a problem we've never seen before. Why should we waste time trying to help him, when there is a chance that problem is fixed in the latest revision?

In these cases, our first answer would always be "Update to the latest version" anyway.

Why would you *want* to use an outdated version of the program? There are maybe 1 or 2 games that work in older revisions and not the latest. The only possible reason is that older versions are less resource demanding. But then if you wanna do that, we aren't responsible for fixing things that were already fixed by the devs.

That's simply how it is. We all volunteer our time here, because we want to. I've made over 7500 posts here in under a year. There are only a few of us who do tech support for PCSX2 and have the necessary knowledge and experience to do it right. We don't want to waste our time supporting old versions that have bugs that have already been fixed.

And quite a lot was fixed from 1.0.0 -> 1.2.1, by the way.

Sorry if I sound like a *****, I'm not trying to.
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#8
(09-16-2014, 04:01 AM)Blyss Sarania Wrote: We support only the latest plugins too. And here is why:

Guy A comes on the forums with 0.9.8, and has a problem that has been fixed in 1.2.1. Why should we waste time trying to help this guy, when the problem was already fixed?

Guy B comes on to the forum with 1.0.0 and has a problem we've never seen before. Why should we waste time trying to help him, when there is a chance that problem is fixed in the latest revision?

In these cases, our first answer would always be "Update to the latest version" anyway.

Why would you *want* to use an outdated version of the program? There are maybe 1 or 2 games that work in older revisions and not the latest. The only possible reason is that older versions are less resource demanding. But then if you wanna do that, we aren't responsible for fixing things that were already fixed by the devs.

That's simply how it is. We all volunteer our time here, because we want to. I've made over 7500 posts here in under a year. There are only a few of us who do tech support for PCSX2 and have the necessary knowledge and experience to do it right. We don't want to waste our time supporting old versions that have bugs that have already been fixed.

And quite a lot was fixed from 1.0.0 -> 1.2.1, by the way.

Sorry if I sound like a *****, I'm not trying to.

You don't sound like a ***** at all, and frankly, you provided a much more reasonable responce than I expected.
I understand what you mean, since you're devoting your free time on helping people, you want to spend it as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Also, I use 1.0.0 pretty much only due to it being less demanding than newer ones that deliver more accurate experience. And I never had any notieceable or gamebreaking bugs so far anyway.
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