Am I getting the most out of my laptop?

[IbnGalenus]

Hello everybody.

Maybe my laptop's specs just aren't as great as I thought, but I'm concerned I might not be getting the most out of it as far as PS2 emulation goes.

This happens with all my games; I can reach a smooth 60 fps in simple areas, but it dips down to 30-40 when things get busy onscreen.

Here are my specs:
Intel Core i5-450M
ATI Radeon HD5850 1GB DDR5
4GB DDRIII RAM

I'm not using any speed hacks and am running the games in native resolution.

EE hovers between 96-100%
GS is between 20-30%

From what I understand, a maxed out EE value indicates that the CPU is already working as hard as it can and is bottlenecking everything. But when I check the task manager, the CPU Usage is only between 40-50% during these times.

Should I be getting better results than I am, or is this performance to be expected?

[iviv]

From what I understand, a maxed out EE value indicates that the CPU is already working as hard as it can and is bottlenecking everything. But when I check the task manager, the CPU Usage is only between 40-50% during these times.

I'm not certain about how PCSX2 is coded, but that sounds like you are indeed CPU limited, and the program just isn't well adapted to dealing with multiple cores. There's only so many threads you can use, I would guess PCSX2 uses two, one on each core. You technically have 4 cores (2 + 2HT), its going to max out 2 of them with those 2 threads, so it only shows up as a 50% CPU use, while in actuality the cores are maxed out.

[IbnGalenus]

Thanks for the clarification iviv.

I didn't know my processor was quad core. That makes a lot more sense and has pointed me to a lot of similar discussion regarding pcsx2 and 4 core support.

I'll just go ahead and start using the speed hacks now. The games are certainly playable when those are enabled.

Many thanks to the pcsx2 team for their hard work.

[iviv]

Thanks for the clarification iviv.

I didn't know my processor was quad core. That makes a lot more sense and has pointed me to a lot of similar discussion regarding pcsx2 and 4 core support.

I'll just go ahead and start using the speed hacks now. The games are certainly playable when those are enabled.

Many thanks to the pcsx2 team for their hard work.

Technically it isn't quad core, intel came up with 'Hyperthreading' which is essentially running two threads on one core. This is faster than just one thread per core, but is not as fast as having two seperate cores, each running one thread. It gives about a 30% speed boost compared to just having the one thread on one core.

But to Windows it is treated as two cores, so you get the 50% usage you're seeing.