[Bug report] Soul Calibur 3 low fps rate at Lost Cathedral and Lost Cathedral ruin

[gasabbath]

Do you have a program like Afterburner (or any other monitoring program that does realtime clockspeed monitoring)?  The issue might be that the GPU is not recognizing the load from PCSX2 and not clocking up high enough at the beginning of the fight and after a bit of being under load it clocks up.  If this is the case you could try using Nvidia's control panel to set the power management mode to high performance when PCSX2 is running.  I have had this happen in some emulators so I just always set this for all emulators since occasionally GPU drivers do not see emulator loads as demanding workload and don't clock properly.  (Though this is far more common in Optimus powered laptops then desktops going so far as to not even use the dedicated graphics and instead fall back to the integrated ones.)  Either way it is at least worth a look.

I already using the high performance setting because Demul (The Dreamcast emulator) has the problem that you mentioned.

I downloaded Afterburner and checked the gpu clock frequency and it increase at the beginning of the fight when the game has the low fps rate, and then when the game reaches 60 fps, the frequency is the same. So the gpu frequency is not the problem here I guess.

[gasabbath]

Can you see if EE Cycle skipping helps ?

The problem disappear after setting EE Cycle skipping at 2 but the game is slower despite of the 60 fps rate. 

Thank you very much!!

What is the "magic" behind this hack? haha

[masterotaku]

I can confirm that ever since more graphics effects are emulated in DX11, performance has lowered a lot. Where I was able to play comfortably at 6x native resolution with some performance to spare, now I can barely handle 4x. Keep in mind this is with 3D Vision, which doubles the GPU usage of my GTX 1080.

If I use a mix of skipdraw (between 1 and 2) and disable some pixel shaders, I get most of that difference back (but graphically it goes back to the "dark ages" of no character shadows ).

Unless the performance drop is unexpected by the PCSX2 developers, this is just progress and we'll just have to wait for better hardware.

[lightningterror]

The issue with SC3 is different, the performance issue happens on both hardware and software mode and it's not a spec limitation.

Maybe a GSdx bottleneck ? I don't know.

[gasabbath]

The issue with SC3 is different, the performance issue happens on both hardware and software mode and it's not a spec limitation.

Maybe a GSdx bottleneck ? I don't know.

Not only it's not a spec limitation, it's a problem of these particular stages, the most haviest in terms of renderization in the game I guess.
It's like the game needs some time for rendering all the objects in these stages.
I repeat, the problem in independent of the plugin setting. The fps problem also occurs with the defeaut resolution.

[pandubz]

The problem disappear after setting EE Cycle skipping at 2 but the game is slower despite of the 60 fps rate. 

Thank you very much!!

What is the "magic" behind this hack? haha

EE cycle skipping completely destroys any chance of the framerate counter being accurate. It will just about always report full speed even when the game is moving at an absolute crawl. Is there any particular reason this is being enabled here?

[gasabbath]

EE cycle skipping completely destroys any chance of the framerate counter being accurate. It will just about always report full speed even when the game is moving at an absolute crawl. Is there any particular reason this is being enabled here?

It was a suggestion made by lightningterror. 
I am going to test this particular stages of the game on a more powerfull pc and I will post the results.

Thank you for the support guys!