FFXII sudden slow down, used to be perfectly playable

[Chik'Tikka]

Same issue with FFXII and also with a different game, Xenosaga EP-1 (2001). Its mostly cutscenes (15+ hours cinematic voice over cut-scenes, take that FF!), and I'd to get them back to 60 fps, i haven't tried a svn yet. my specs are 2nd gen i5 Intel, 6 GB DDR3 1600 Mhz RAM, Nvidia 540M 1 GB DDR3 1333 MHz video. 0.9.8 Installed on Part C: (365 GB) with driver 2.0 (i actually dumped mine for the lolz+^_^+). .ISO is in Part G: (50 GB), rest of HDD is unallocated (283 GB),
TOSHIBA Satellite P775 motherboard mainboard System Board. Regardless of settings or hacks, GS regularly hits 100% (hovered at 30-70% previously). 90% of in game and 50% of cut-scenes have FPS at 50%-75% (main reason i think is some cut-scenes are compiled on the fly with the game engine and the rest are prerecorded video files (FMV?). My processor is dual core but has 4 threads and i noticed pcsx2 only uses 2 of them (48%usage?), maybe adding support for a third thread might help? Main reason i would like to see a resolution is it looks so much better then my actual PS2 (via yellow composite) on my big screen (via HDMi) i know this is my first post, but i didn't have issues at all before, things just worked!! (but then i only played 4 games)

[Yuuzora]

Erm, how silly of me...I forgot to state my specs lol.

   
   

Can lack of free HDD space be the cause of the slow down? I have ~44GB free on C: where the pcsx2 is installed.

[Bositman]

It is better and I can even achieve my old speed with MTVU speedhack on. But, the FPS degrades quickly again as soon as I turn my view around (especially when there are lots of NPCs and/or objects) and also when I'm out on the field area. So maybe the issue lies in the rendering engine?

Nope that makes perfect sense, more objects on screen->more stuff to render->more CPU power needed which you lack.

Can lack of free HDD space be the cause of the slow down? I have ~44GB free on C: where the pcsx2 is installed.

No, nothing to do with it

Same issue with FFXII and also with a different game, Xenosaga EP-1 (2001). Its mostly cutscenes (15+ hours cinematic voice over cut-scenes, take that FF!), and I'd to get them back to 60 fps, i haven't tried a svn yet. my specs are 2nd gen i5 Intel, 6 GB DDR3 1600 Mhz RAM, Nvidia 540M 1 GB DDR3 1333 MHz video. 0.9.8 Installed on Part C: (365 GB) with driver 2.0 (i actually dumped mine for the lolz+^_^+). .ISO is in Part G: (50 GB), rest of HDD is unallocated (283 GB),
TOSHIBA Satellite P775 motherboard mainboard System Board. Regardless of settings or hacks, GS regularly hits 100% (hovered at 30-70% previously). 90% of in game and 50% of cut-scenes have FPS at 50%-75% (main reason i think is some cut-scenes are compiled on the fly with the game engine and the rest are prerecorded video files (FMV?). My processor is dual core but has 4 threads and i noticed pcsx2 only uses 2 of them (48%usage?), maybe adding support for a third thread might help? Main reason i would like to see a resolution is it looks so much better then my actual PS2 (via yellow composite) on my big screen (via HDMi) i know this is my first post, but i didn't have issues at all before, things just worked!! (but then i only played 4 games)

It all comes down to your PC, my i5 @ 4,3 Ghz can handle all that at about 80 FPS...PCSX2 can already use a third core in the 0.9.9 SVN builds via the new MTVU speed hack.

[Yuuzora]

But that doesn't explain why I used to be able to run the game at ~60 FPS almost all the time even in areas where now I am lagging a lot.

[Bositman]

If you are using the exact same settings,plugins and PCSX2 revision but you are getting different performance than what you used to, it is a setup problem and nothing to do with the emulator. Some bad GPU driver, something overheating maybe and throttling its speed to prevent damage, it could be tons of stuff.

[Yuuzora]

I see, in that case I guess it must be the Windows Updates download that caused it.

I did recall downloading some Windows Updates stuffs around the start of the year before the problem happened.
And there were some updates on the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable at that time.
Since pcsx2 does need the Visual C++, maybe the update affected it somehow?

According to Program and Features, I have several different versions of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable installed:
3 different versions of Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable
1 version Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express

Perhaps these different versions are clashing in some way that causes the problem? In that case, should I just remove all the 2008 versions of the Visual C++?

Thanks once again.

[Bositman]

No if that was the problem PCSX2 would not even run, it would not get a speed hit.

[hyakki]

the i5 520M is a dual core cpu also so the MTVU hack might cause sever speed penalties as-well as some speedups depending on the game load (if the EE and GS need more CPU then mtvu will be trying to overload the VU thread, on quad-cores this is offloaded to a free core causing massive speedups, dual-core processors suffer since they don't have the extra core)

as for why you have 4 threads in task manager is 2 are Hyper-threading (virtual) , 2 are the real cpu cores , hyper threading are virtual cores and are shared with the main two cores (think of each core being split into two).

and why you only see 48% usage is that the ht threads are idle (windows calculates the percent because it sees idle 'cores' but they are really virtual) in reality the real cores are fully-loaded (48% = 80-90% cpu load), you can see the real percent if you disabled hyper-threading

[Chik'Tikka]

the i5 520M is a dual core cpu also so the MTVU hack might cause sever speed penalties as-well as some speedups depending on the game load (if the EE and GS need more CPU then mtvu will be trying to overload the VU thread, on quad-cores this is offloaded to a free core causing massive speedups, dual-core processors suffer since they don't have the extra core)

as for why you have 4 threads in task manager is 2 are Hyper-threading (virtual) , 2 are the real cpu cores , hyper threading are virtual cores and are shared with the main two cores (think of each core being split into two).

and why you only see 48% usage is that the ht threads are idle (windows calculates the percent because it sees idle 'cores' but they are really virtual) in reality the real cores are fully-loaded (48% = 80-90% cpu load), you can see the real percent if you disabled hyper-threading

I see, thanks for the quick explanation (looked up more on Wiki), I'm just starting programming classes in college so maybe in a few years, if someone hasn't already, I'll try and see if there's a way to improve hyper threading support+^_^+ and i think i agree with Yuuzora about the update thing, everything was fine until mid Jan, perhaps one of the Win updates throttled my Turbo Boost. I'll try rolling back my system to December and see what happens+^_^+ BTW switched to the r5109 which solved few other issues i had+^_^+

[Chik'Tikka]

I fixed FFXII (at least for me) by opening GSdx.ini and changing the AllowHacks=0 to AllowHacks=1 and then in the video plugin putting skipdraw to a value of 1, it helped me get 10 frames faster on Xenosaga EP-1 as well+^_^+