How can I raise fps?

[Megidolaon]

I'm playing .hack//GU Vol 3 and during battles fps may drop to 30 or lower.
Playing Xenosaga ep 3 and during battles it went as low as 17fps.

I haven't turned on interlacing, anti alias or changed any other graphics setting.
Skipping frames kinda helps but the speech sounds awkward, also skipping 2 frames is stable but skipping 1 frame causes pcsx2 not to draw new frames at all and skipping 3 frames is super fast outside of battles.

I don't understand why cause it's a new pc and it has some horsepower (except the graphics card maybe).
CPU: AMD A-10 5800 Quadcore with 3.8 GHz
graphics card: Radeon 7660HD
RAM: 16 GB
OS: Win 7 SP 1

Neither the cpu nor graphics card are in the compatibility list though.
What other settings can help raise the fps?

Thanks!

[DaTankAC]

The cpu is decent. The gpu is no better than some crappy budget DDR3 card. Most likely that's what's holding you back. What are the EE and GS% during the slowdowns.

[Yash the gamer]

Any non default speed hack u use..

[Yash the gamer]

Use native resolution, enable speed hacks..

[NarooN]

What do the EE and VU meters say (they're at the top of the PCSX2 window during gameplay) when the slowdowns happen?

Yeah, the iGPU is most likely what is holding you back. If I remember correctly, Xenosaga was a pretty demanding game overall.

[Megidolaon]

No speed hacks, all settings at default.
Odd, now I finished a battle and fps was never below 50 (fine with me).
Though the sound is slow (secondary as well).

But it was a fluke, afterwards it's back to 30fps.
EE hovers at ~85%, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower.
GS is more around the 34% mark.

Oddly, other battles were at 50+ fps as well. And now .hack//GU, too.
Weird...but not a bad thing
Though I guess this is a lucky combination of other stuff I got running (though I never run that much during emulation).

Something else though, in hack GU for some reason there was a transparent model of Haseo over his real model, displayed upwards about 1/3 of the height. It disappeared after entering a battle and didn't re-appear after leaving the battle either.
When stuff like this happens, is it possible to be a one time effect or will it inevitably return at some point when whatever triggered it occurs again?

[NarooN]

Some games don't have 100% accuracy yet. Sometimes weird issues can be fixed by playing in software mode, or by messing with different clamp modes and messing with the skipdraw values (this is under the graphics config in PCSX2.)

Hmm, since EE% is sorta high, but not reaching 99%/100%, I'd guess the game is EE-dependent. Maybe it's one of those games that are just inherently buggy.

[Rezard]

Your RAM;
Is it 1333...?

[nosisab Ken Keleh]

Xenosaga games are hard on the machine, mainly because they don't play well with EE cyclerate speedhack (sound desync and such), your best bet is trying VU Cycle stealing at 1 or even 2 (it can cause some minor issues but should help a lot).

Oddly enough, Xenosaga is harder than Xenosaga II on the emulator and II is harder than 3 if I do recall correctly.

The video card is on the weaker side indeed but should not be really a problem with those games, just make sure reducing the upscale if you notice there is a gain in performance, if 2x is still too much you should try native resolution.

Don't be afraid of using speedhacks, just remember the minimal possible that makes the game playable, the best. For most games a combination of EE cyclerate with VU cycle stealing is the best hope of increasing performance.

Finally, a few games don't work well in graphics hardware mode and you may need to use software mode with them (notorious case is Final Fantasy X-2 wich don't play the cutscenes well in hardware). There is an option to automatically fallback to software mode on cutscenes, what can help.

[Megidolaon]

Thanks, will try that.