God of War 1 PAL sudden slowdown

[exon]

Hi everyone,

I'm getting 50fp/s on Gow1 most of the time
(using only recommended hacks), except for some tiny
slow-down areas where the framerate drops to 25 and EE drops from
~70 to ~50%, GS remains unchanged at ~ 20-30%. Even turning
frame-limiting off makes the EE-value drop to ~50 in a slowdown-area.

Is this a plugin-bug ? When I leave the slow area, frames go up to
50 instantly. Turning all speed-hacks on or using ZeroSPU2-plugin doesn't change anything.

Emulator:

-PCSXr4977
-GSdx 0.1.16 AVX (or SSE4.1)

-SPU-2Xr4949 V2.0.0 (interpolation=0, effects-processing=off,timestretch,
stereo)

- PAL BIOS V02.20 (10/02/06)
-native PS2-resolution

My system:

-Intel i3 2120 @ 3.3 GHZ
-Intel HD Graphics 2000
-4GB DDR-RAM
-Windows 7 64-bit

I read that the sound-plugin might cause the slow-downs so I switched
to Direct3D-sound and played around with latency ect, but doing so
either produced audio-bugs or did not do anything.

Any advice ?

have a nice day

[jesalvein]

that GPU won't help you, since it's very weak.
Else, are you on a laptop ?
if yes, set power plan to performance mode.

[exon]

I'm on a desktop-computer. As I said, the EE-value goes down to around 50% which causes the slowdown. I know my GPU isn't that good, but the GPU-usage doesn't go up during slowdown. Locations slowdown occurs aren't even very demanding graphicallyIMO, e.g. boss battles are super smooth

[jesalvein]

if the EE% is @50%, it means you CPU isn't struggling.
WHat do the GS% say when you get those slowdowns ?

[exon]

GS is always at ~30%, it rarely goes over 60. Even when slowdowns happen, GS remains at ~30 which is the same as when the game runs at 50 frames.

It seems neither CPU nor GPU are the problem as both aren't even close to being maxed out.

[Shadow Lady]

You'd have to try with a lower resolution than native, as jesalvein said it's a weak GPU and neither EE/GS% reaching 90-100% when you get the slowdowns indicate that would be the problem, some people play with a custom resolution of 384x384 but it's just ugly IMHO

[Saiki]

some people play with a custom resolution of 384x384 but it's just ugly IMHO

no, that's 256x256 384 isn't SO bad (I've tested 128 as well lol)

[exon]

@ Shadow Lady

thanks for the advice. Switching from native to 384x384 erased the slowdowns. Game looks really blurry and bad, though, but at such a low res this shouldn't come as a surprise.


I should play around with the resolution a little to see what results I get with other games should they suddenly slow down. Or I'll simply accept the occasional dia-show (GOW1 ran at full speed 90% of the time).