FFX Slow downs: I am sorry. Please help.

[willkuer]

Are these values with or without speedhacks? (If with speedhacks, disable EE cycle hack and MTVU and post again)

The two speedhacks Nobbs suggested didn't help?
Make sure that internal resolution is set to native in gsdx plugin settings.

[Ham08]

was EE ever hitting 99% ?, cause that would indicate cpu bottleneck.

You could try using MTVU hack it may help,

No it was never hitting anywhere near 99%. I have the MTVU hack setting "on" as per Nobbs66's suggestion.

Should I just go with tsunami2311's suggestion and configure for absolute low-end machine from tsunami2311 and Saiki's signature?

[willkuer]

Yes you can try that.
Probably your emulator is somehow misconfigured and this leads to the problems. Using the mentioned guide can solve the problem.

[tsunami2311]

make sure allow 8 bit textures is NOT checked in GSDX apparently it can cause slow down problems.

http://wiki.pcsx2.net/index.php/Final_Fantasy_X

[Ham08]

Are these values with or without speedhacks? (If with speedhacks, disable EE cycle hack and MTVU and post again)

The two speedhacks Nobbs suggested didn't help?
Make sure that internal resolution is set to native in gsdx plugin settings.

Ok when I shut both those off, the EE went to 100%. I had the internal resolution set to native in gsdx plugin settings.

To tsunami2311:
I have always had that option off.

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I tried the low-end settings from the link in tsunami2311 and Saiki's signature (editing for my unique PC paths) and it is a bit better but there is still a slight slow down (just not as much or as often). However, the quality is very poor and is very hard on the eyes. It's a shame, really.

The funny thing is that my older PC with a AMD duel core 3Ghz, same video card, and half the ram (much slower ram) played this game with ease and much higher quality.

< gives dumfounded look >

Is that the best I can hope for?

---

Ok I think I fixed it, thanks to all of your help!

For some reason, the "allow 8-bit textures" box was checked again even though I swore it was off and double checked before I switched to the low-end settings (copy pasted and edited for path). I had to set it back to ISO instead of plugin, too, for some reason. shrugs. Turning "allow 8-bit textures" back off by un-checking the box in the video plugin settings got rid of the rest of the slow downs. Woohoo!

After that, I decided to just check and see if I could bump up the quality a bit and set the D3D Internal Resolution to 3x native and now I have good quality and no slow down! double woohoo! Starting with the bare minimum settings like you suggested was the key. Then bumping one setting at a time seems the way to go. Luckily for me it was just one setting.

Thank you so much for all your help! This is really an awesome community with so many great people willing to help out a complete stranger. You have my gratitude. All of you!

Now I can get back to re-playing an old classic that is still one of my all time favorites.

Thanks again, everyone! Positive energy to you all and may it come back ten fold!

Ham08

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Well, that was short lived.

It still has aggravating slow downs constantly, even when i have the low-end settings and native internal resolution (looks very bad and still has very poor performance).

I don't know why my machine is having trouble emulating FFX. All the parts on it are brand new and it runs perfectly. The OS and drivers are fairly up to date (3 months old at most) I haven't had any trouble playing modern games like Skyrim or Mass Effect 3 with excellent quality, so I don't know what the deal is.

Does anyone have any other suggestions I can try? I am depressed that I can not even emulate an old PS2 game on this machine.

[jesalvein]

I don't know why my machine is having trouble emulating FFX. All the parts on it are brand new and it runs perfectly. The OS and drivers are fairly up to date (3 months old at most) I haven't had any trouble playing modern games like Skyrim or Mass Effect 3 with excellent quality, so I don't know what the deal is.

start by not comparing pc games to emulation (unless you really want to sound ridiculous)

Does anyone have any other suggestions I can try? I am depressed that I can not even emulate an old PS2 game on this machine.

do you have by any chance AMD cool n' quiet enabled in your bios ?

[Ham08]

start by not comparing pc games to emulation (unless you really want to sound ridiculous)
do you have by any chance AMD cool n' quiet enabled in your bios ?

Sorry. I realize that it takes much more resources to emulate a console than it does to play a game that was meant to run on the PC (It is a remarkable achievement that the programmers of this emulator can do it at all. The achievement is far beyond my understanding. I am amazed at their talent!). Nonetheless, I am still disappointed with my computer since I have read posts on this forum from people who are emulating this game much better with lesser machines. I hope you understand my frustration.

No. I do not have cool-n-quiet running.

[jesalvein]

Nonetheless, I am still disappointed with my computer since I have read posts on this forum from people who are emulating this game much better with lesser machines. I hope you understand my frustration.

I understand it and you're right since FFX is a low demanding one and your PC is quite good for pcsx2.

I'd bet on something external eating your CPU resources, or a kind of overheating.

Maybe you should try monitoring both (using CoreTemp & processxp) to see if one rises too much when getting slowdowns

[Ham08]

I understand it and you're right since FFX is a low demanding one and your PC is quite good for pcsx2.

I'd bet on something external eating your CPU resources, or a kind of overheating.

Maybe you should try monitoring both (using CoreTemp & processxp) to see if one rises too much when getting slowdowns

The first thing I do when I boot up my computer in the morning is start Process Explorer (monitor processes) and AIDA64 Engineer edition (monitor temperatures plus other). I keep track of these at all times and I am very obsessive about it. I do this because I want to be able to immediately take care of problems before they become serious and cause damage, infection, or corruption.

During my attempts to emulate the PS2 for FFX, I have not noticed any strange processes running or abnormally high CPU usage. However, my CPU temperatures are indeed very high in my opinion (70-75C ; This happens whether running Prime95 (all six cores 100% load), PC Games, or the emulator. Still 70-75C. Idles around 50-55C), but that was true on day one and has not affected any other programs or games that I have run and that fact is significant if only slightly. My GPU runs around 70C full load and is well within safe operating perimeters. I absolutely need to buy an after-market cooler for the CPU as soon as I can afford it. No question. But, I don't get the feeling that this is the cause of the emulation problem, though I could be wrong.

Could it be that my set up for the emulator is not optimal? There are a great number configuration options and plugins for the emulator so I wonder if I am just using a less desirable configuration for my particular system.

Again, let me stress that I am not complaining about the emulator itself or anything anyone has done at this forum (Everyone has been extremely generous with their time and they have been very helpful.). There is only a small percentage of the world population who are programmers, smaller still who can actually create an emulator like this, and even smaller of those who would create an emulator like this and release it to the public FREE of charge. The PCSX2 emulator is a very rare and beautiful thing and I am grateful.

There is evidence all over the net proving that the emulator does an amazing job and I have especially witnessed the emulator making FFX look and run beautiful(ly) even on much lesser machines. There is no question in my mind that the problem is either with my computer or with my configuration of the emulator.

[willkuer]

What is the cpu usage in taskmanager during idling (windows)? How dows it change during emulation? Please keep an eye on the single core usage not the total usage.

Make sure MTVU is enabled. If I see it correctly the sliders are at minimum in saiki's settiings. You can try to increase them one-by-one. VU cycle stealing fakes better fps-readings. I would probably use EE cycle rate first. I think this fast cdvd is not needed. I at least never used it.

Use Async-mix in audio output settings of spux-2 instead of Timestretch to reduce the annoying music during slowdowns.

Have you tested if your cpu is really running at the given clock-rate? Maybe after upgrading the settings in the bios are not optimal anymore. I would check that with cpu-z.

You can probably enhance the quality by increasing the native resolution in gsdx plugin settings without decreasing the performance too much. This is mainly gpu-intense and you are cpu-limited. use the highest SSE-number that is available as gsdx-plugin. Use DX10/11 as hardware renderer.



If all of that doesn't work try superVU instead of microVU in the VU-settings in the emulator settings.