Guitar Hero + Rock Band... FPS Issue?
#1
Hey all. I seem to be having an issue with music games (Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero 5, Rock Band). The emulator is reporting a rock solid 59-60 FPS, but the framerate at times looks more like 30-40. Nothing is even close to maxing out to cause performance issues- EE: 30-40%, GS: 15-20%, VU: 7-15%.. these values are rarely exceeded.

It plays smooth for like 5 seconds, then gets choppy for about 5, then smooth, choppy, smooth, choppy... with absolutely no change in framerate or system load.

I've tried everything I can think of. I dumped the discs to ISO and tried Linuz Plugin, skipdraw hacks in GS plugin, speedhacks, tons of different PCSX2 versions/revisions, D3D 9/11 Software/Hardware... But nothing seems to fix the issue. The game never drops a frame below 59, but it looks like 30 at times which makes it practically unplayable to my eyes.

Any idea what could be causing this issue? This doesn't seem to happen in most other games I play such as God of War, Castlevania:LoI, FFX etc... although it does seem to happen in Kingdom Hearts 2 sometimes. It reports 59-60 FPS but looks sorta laggy. I don't ever use the speed hacks, although I have tried them out but they really do nothing for me.

My PC is pretty beast, so I know there can't be a bottleneck, can there?

CPU: Intel 2500K @ 4.8Ghz
RAM: 8GB DDR3 @ 1600 Mhz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
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#2
That's very weird, with that PC the game should be playing at insanely above full speed....these games do have problems with GSdx so I suggest you try an older build, for example the one included in the 0.9.8 release. You should also use skipdraw (2 if I recall correctly) to get rid of garbage and super slowness.
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#3
I've tried just about everything, still can't seem to eliminate those stutter points. I did manage to make it a little less frequent by tweaking the EE Cyclerate. After some careful monitoring, I noticed it happens when EE usage goes to anything above 50%, and the higher it is, the more stutter I see.

I noticed most of the time, EE reads between 25-40%, the fret bar scrolls so smoothly, doesn't skip a beat. Every so often it hits 50-55%, and a tiny bit of choppiness is visible. 2 seconds later, it will get to around 60-65% and it becomes very visible. Maybe 3-5 times in a song, it will hit 70%ish and for that second or two its enough to drive me nuts before it drops back down to the 30's. The strange thing is, I never dropped a frame below 59 the entire time but it just doesn't look like 60FPS when the EE starts to get up there.

- Having this issue on versions dating back to 0.9.6 to latest rev.
- I used no speedhacks of any sort, only default options.
- Tried skipdraw 1,2,3

For some reason it seems the higher the EE % goes, the more choppy it looks regardless if I'm getting a steady FPS or not. Is this normal behavior, or is this problem unique to me? I'm at a loss of what to try next. I'm desperate to play these on PCSX2, its just not the same on my PS2. I'm spoiled by 6x native res on my 1080 TV, and want to pull out my X-box 360 xplorer guitar.
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