Burnout Revenge stuff & Extra rendering threads

[Thewonderboy]

So I was testing around with Burnout Revenge (which apparently is pretty demanding) and decided to try to get the game playable on software mode (as hardware mode either has minor graphic glitches or requires extra tweaking to get it look clean).

First few things I noticed which I thought were weird:

- The game doesnt run at full speed even though none of my readings (EE, VU etc) hit 100%. They hover around 50-70%.
- The game appears to run better in 50Hz mode than in 60Hz mode (this is a PAL game so its an option). I say this because in 60Hz mode the game dips as low as 40FPS but in 50Hz mode that game also dips to 40FPS which is closer to the target emulation speed (50 vs 60 FPS)
- Music always seems to play at normal speed even though the game slows down (is this related to audio plugin settings or does the game just somehow make sure that the music always plays at regular speed?)


Speedhacks... They dont really do anything for me. MTVU off shows significant performance decrease, VU cycle stealing set 1-2 doesnt do anything visible so I decided not to experiment with 3. EE cycle rate hack set to 1 might have a very minor increase in performance as it feels like the game runs very slightly faster but I dont see much of a increase in FPS.


Now, about the Extra Rendering Threads setting. Many people say that you should never set the value above 3 or 4 even if you have a CPU that has more threads available (like my I7 2600, 4 physical cores, 8 threads) but as I tested setting threads lower and higher, I saw a direct decline/increase in performance all the way up to 7.

Starting from 4 rendering threads, I saw about 3-5 FPS increase every time I added one ERT starting from 4 = 39 FPS peak (5 = 43 -> 6 = 47 -> 7 = 50 -> 8 = no change in overall performance). When set to 7 or 8 it would never go bellow 40 FPS but the averange FPS wouldnt change between the two values.


Is there anything else I can do or are there any possible explanations to those 3 occurances that I listed ?

I want to also add that my CPU can handle R&C3 at very playable framerates (with possibly one or the other speedhack sliders set to 1) by maintaining 50 FPS most of the time. Is Burnout Revenge more demanding than R&C ?

[Nobbs66]

Everything after Burnout 2 is HARD to run in SW mode. Also Ratchet and Clank UYA is probably the easiest of the main three R&C games

[willkuer]

Could it be that you are limited by dvd-access time? So are you either using directly the dvd or store the image on a slow hdd? This would easily explain the low VU/EE/GS rates.
Another explanation would be that this is speedhack related (as you are obviously using MTVU). They can fake those displays.

In my experience EE is the easiest value to get to 100%. And probably this will be the case if you disable MTVU. (well maybe not considering the dependency on extra rendering threads)

You can test to set clamping to none... but probably this will result in some strange problems as you are playing a racing game that depends on correctly working physics. So maybe the collision calculations will work in a different way or something like that.


What happens if you increase the extra rendering threads further? Do you get slowdowns at some point?

[Thewonderboy]

Could it be that you are limited by dvd-access time? So are you either using directly the dvd or store the image on a slow hdd? This would easily explain the low VU/EE/GS rates.
Another explanation would be that this is speedhack related (as you are obviously using MTVU). They can fake those displays.

In my experience EE is the easiest value to get to 100%. And probably this will be the case if you disable MTVU. (well maybe not considering the dependency on extra rendering threads)

You can test to set clamping to none... but probably this will result in some strange problems as you are playing a racing game that depends on correctly working physics. So maybe the collision calculations will work in a different way or something like that.


What happens if you increase the extra rendering threads further? Do you get slowdowns at some point?

Ripped the game (to .img) from my discs and surprisingly Im seeing very slight bump in the FPS (and helps with the FPS consistency, obviously) but its still not hitting 50 FPS constantly.

You are also right about the MTVU, I didnt realize that without it, my EE hits 100%, I found that setting EE cycle rate hack @ 3 doesnt seem to have any downsides to it so Im using it and now the EE usage howers around 80-95 occasionally hitting 100%

MTVU appears to gimp the performance so I have set it off.

Clampping set to none seems to have no positive nor negative effect so Im leaving it to default.


Adding extra threads past 8 (even 8 causes some minor slowdowns) will consistently decrease the performance. Setting it to 13 causes the FPS to be around 30-39. 6 might have some occasions where the FPS is a bit higher than when set to 7 but overall its more jumpy than 7 ETR so Im sticking with number 7.

VU cycle stealing still appears to do nothing special.



So now the game is running pretty much all the time around 43-46 FPS and sometimes peaking at 50 and dipping to 40.


Btw, any fix for this graphics glitch (see attachment, the sun shining through buildings, see the image) ?


- Also something interesting, the game runs at full speed at all times when you play it in splitscreen, it was at steady 50 FPS constantly.
- Hardware mode in Splitscreen (even with fixes and the SW/HW mode switch trick) has some serious graphics problems for the second player (everything is stretched out, textures and model faces are either bugged or missing and weird shadows/black surfaces everywhere). Probably has something to do with how the game handles splitscreen.
- In Traffic Attack the game runs at constant 30 FPS (rock solid, like its locked at 30 FPS) but when the first player crashes into something, the game returns to normal speed (50 FPS). This does not happen though when the second player crashes.