Extremely low FPS

[Xironish]

Hi guys, so i got the emulator up and running, and everything seemed fine until the ingame menu faded in (Shadow of the Colossus). While loading the game it's at a steady 60 to 80 fps. But when the game starts. boom, drops right down to 7/13fps which is almost unplayable, extremely laggy and occational freezes out of the two games i've tested on (SotC and DMC 3) this always occurs.
I'm running on
-AMD Phenom 9650 QQ Processor 2.3 ghz
-ATI radeon 4650HD 1gb
-4gb ram (3gb in use/32bit vista)
which i think is a pretty OK setup as far as gaming goes. But should have no problem emulating a ps2 game.

Gfx: GSdx 890 SSE2 / ZeroGS 0.97.1 - Direct3D 10 (Hardware)
Controller: SSSPSX PAD Plugin 1.7.0
Cdvdrom: Linuz Iso DVD 0.8.0
Sound: SPU2-X 1.1.0

w/ USA v02.00 BIOS

and btw i've already tried the frame skip and speed hacks, helped but still totally unplayable.
any advice is appreciated!

[nasageek]

SotC is an incredibly intensive game. Because of this, your relatively low clock speed CPU just can't handle it. You can try messing with the speed hacks to get better FPS but don't expect too much.

[Shadow Lady]

Try enabling the "native" checkbox in GSdx, also try the latest PCSX2 beta and enabling the "VU cycle stealing" speedhack on it and set to moderate.

http://forums.pcsx2.net/thread-3716.html

[vsub]

And since you have ATI,it's best to update your GSdx