I Can Run KH1....

[HooverDamned]

i can run the Kingdom Hearts iso with some lag, but every other game i've tried does not perform well. however, Timesplitters and Half-Life runs nicely.

laptop
windows 7 home premium
processor-intel core i3-2350M CPU @ 2.30GHZ
RAM- 4GB
system- 64 bit
graphics-intel HD graphics family

other isos i have tried
-Red Faction (runs slow)
-Ultimate Spiderman (standard edition) (missingno. like comic book panels/i start up the game and it's a black screen with peter parker and venom's health bar. cannot progress)
-The Thing (the beginning cinematic looks bugged/starts game i take a step/aim and it crashes)
-Crash Twinsanity (extremely slow and un-playable)
-Spy-Hunter (the game menus work fine/starting the game i see the background graphics rendering. won't let me play the game)
-Unreal Tournament (runs okay.)
-Amplitude (runs really slow)

why can i run kingdom hearts with little to no problems, but these other games play with issues?

---

blurple

[omnikam]

Gpu is too slow for alot of games, cpu isnt much better having only 2 cores and 4 threads, Still you could try using the Mtvu hack and a few others to steal a few extra frames, but seriously onboard gpu just wont cut it in most cases
EDIT: you wont even be able to use Mtvu hack

[VIRGIN KLM]

Kingdom Hearts series are examples of optimizasion freaks so don't get surprised it runs well. Also the Final Mix versions are even further optimized and result some extra speed with zero cost at quality, I bet they went back and tried to fix some tiiiny stuff they didn't notice on the first releases. That's Square (Enix), optimization freaks!

[HooverDamned]

what games would you recommend for someone with my specs that, unfortunately, can't run the app proper? is there a list someone complied? Omnikam, you sound like you're in the same boat as me. what games can you play? and Virgin KLM, you're telling me that the reason kingdom hearts runs better than the other games, is because of the way square developed it?

[Ice Queen Zero]

i think 2d games should be enough to play at 60fps with your specs...

[VIRGIN KLM]

Virgin KLM, you're telling me that the reason kingdom hearts runs better than the other games, is because of the way square developed it?

Yes, mostly. Not only it's optimized for the actual PS2 hardware but the philosophy of the emulator and how it works and how the speedhacks work match perfectly with what developers had in mind when they were optimizing the game. There are a couple of other games that have that too.
One is Obscure (1) and the other is Digimon World 4 to make some examples from completely different genres. Obscure can run in 720p with nearly zero slowdowns even in a ***** machine, same applies for Digimon Worls 4.

In contrast, there are some games that run so bad that have no excuse and it's not PCSX2's fault, it's just that the game is baaaadly optimized. The best of all examples I could think is all Tekken series games in PS2, their engine tends to spare unused resources in an attempt to try to mentain constant 60fps which technically is useless, the game engine will never get that stressed so after Tekken 4 they tried to get rid of that philosophy even though it's still there but at a smaller amount. Another example is the God of War series. The developers didn't even try to optimize the whole engine for a such weak hardware as PS2 causing most of the times bad framerates even on real PS2 hardware. Even worse what the developers did on that game is exactly the weak spot of PCSX2's philosophy so you can imagine why it needs such a powerful hardware to emulate the game at a decent speed.

So the problem isn't only the way PCSX2 emulates PS2 and it's internals and needs such high processing power, but most PS2's developers didn't even try to balance things in the games they developed resulting into bad performance even on a real hardware.

[HooverDamned]

Yes, mostly. Not only it's optimized for the actual PS2 hardware but the philosophy of the emulator and how it works and how the speedhacks work match perfectly with what developers had in mind when they were optimizing the game. There are a couple of other games that have that too.
One is Obscure (1) and the other is Digimon World 4 to make some examples from completely different genres. Obscure can run in 720p with nearly zero slowdowns even in a ***** machine, same applies for Digimon Worls 4.

In contrast, there are some games that run so bad that have no excuse and it's not PCSX2's fault, it's just that the game is baaaadly optimized. The best of all examples I could think is all Tekken series games in PS2, their engine tends to spare unused resources in an attempt to try to mentain constant 60fps which technically is useless, the game engine will never get that stressed so after Tekken 4 they tried to get rid of that philosophy even though it's still there but at a smaller amount. Another example is the God of War series. The developers didn't even try to optimize the whole engine for a such weak hardware as PS2 causing most of the times bad framerates even on real PS2 hardware. Even worse what the developers did on that game is exactly the weak spot of PCSX2's philosophy so you can imagine why it needs such a powerful hardware to emulate the game at a decent speed.

So the problem isn't only the way PCSX2 emulates PS2 and it's internals and needs such high processing power, but most PS2's developers didn't even try to balance things in the games they developed resulting into bad performance even on a real hardware.

shouldn't this information be in important threads? that's really rad.