Kingdom Hearts Frame Rate Drops (Good laptop)

[shtj2]

Hi there, was just after some help if anyone's round.

After sampling Kingdom Hearts on my older laptop and getting good speeds in poor resolutions (barring certain cutscenes), I decided to splash out on a much newer laptop in order to experience the higher resolutions this fantastic emulator enables.

The laptop plays both Kingdom Hearts and Chain of Memories wonderfully in 3x resolution with no trouble at all for the most part. However, I have the same issues with particular cutscenes as I did with my previous, much inferior laptop (intel HD, 4gb ram, 2.13 ghz). Interestingly, there are also significant frame rate drops after the original screen when you start the emulator (when it says Playstation 2 in white writing).

The cutscenes that suffer are the ones whereby magic is being cast, the keyblade is being used to seal keyholes, etc... and it happens on both Kingdom Hearts games during the same sort of scenes.

Specs:

i7-3840QM - 2.8 ghz (3.8ghz turbo boost).
16gb RAM
GTX 670MX 2gb

I also have an integrated Intel HD graphics card on here but I've set it on the Nvidia control panel so that PCSX2 uses the NVidia card. One final thing, the cutscene problem isn't quite as bad in DX11 (software) mode but the problem is still there nevertheless. Also, I've set the extra-rendering threads to '3' because of the quad core processor. Don't know if that helps.

Help much appreciated, thanks for making such a fantastic emulator!

[shtj2]

Oh, that GTX 670 MX is 3gb, not 2gb. Sorry! I genuinely don't know if the difference is significant and am fairly computer illiterate; just thought I should be as accurate as possible. I saved up for ages to get a new laptop and it's frustrating that something seems to be amiss.

[jesalvein]

did you set your power plan to high performance ?

[shtj2]

Thanks for the quick reply. Tried that last night and the problems are still there unfortunately. Now that you've said that again though I've just tried it again on both power plans but with the charger in and it works just fine, funnily enough. Is that normal?

I'm a bit cautious about playing an emulator with the charger in given what it kept doing to my last laptop (killed a couple of batteries and chargers)...would I have the same problem with this one do you think? Either way, I'm still wondering why it is there seems to be a problem without the charger. Seems people have similar problems with the FFX aeon summoning scenes and they seem to me like the same sort of animations. Perhaps there's something about them that's quite tasking or something... the CGIs at the start of the games are absolutely perfect by comparison.

[Fayt756]

I can't imagine what is wrong your processor is quite abit better then mine and I have no problems with running games in 3x-4x resolution.

[NarooN]

I haven't played FFX or X2 on a laptop, but certain actions like summoning aeons or using certain magics (like Fire or Flare, for example), would cause frame drops. Your GPU and CPU seem decent for a laptop, so I dunno why that happens.

[shtj2]

Ahh yeah, it's doing my head in! It's only those scenes but it's annoying given that it's a brand new laptop. I don't want to leave my charger in and risk doing any damage to the battery like last time round.

One thing I saw recommended was to download something called Throttlestop. I dare not do anything with it but I've looked at how my computer is supposedly running and it seems to only be using 1785mhz whilst PCSX2 is running. I'm guessing computers are probably smart enough to allocate processing power where necessary but is that not a bit small? Or have I just missed the point altogether entirely?

[Fayt756]

Ahh yeah, it's doing my head in! It's only those scenes but it's annoying given that it's a brand new laptop. I don't want to leave my charger in and risk doing any damage to the battery like last time round.

One thing I saw recommended was to download something called Throttlestop. I dare not do anything with it but I've looked at how my computer is supposedly running and it seems to only be using 1785mhz whilst PCSX2 is running. I'm guessing computers are probably smart enough to allocate processing power where necessary but is that not a bit small? Or have I just missed the point altogether entirely?

I leave my laptop plugged in all the time and it has never hurt anything do you use a cooler master? my laptop rarely gets over ~45c in fact thats the highest ive seen it even playing games/watching anime all day

[shtj2]

I leave my laptop plugged in all the time and it has never hurt anything do you use a cooler master? my laptop rarely gets over ~45c in fact thats the highest ive seen it even playing games/watching anime all day

That sounds good to me then, thanks for the info. I think I was just punching well above my weight with my last laptop running Kingdom Hearts. I'd play it for about an hour before it felt like it was about to blow up so I was cautious that this one, whilst better, may still be affected in some way.

Think I'll just get on with it then and start digging out some of my older games.

[Fayt756]

The cooler master is only $30-35 so its worth the investment since it serves as a stand for the laptop as well to use on your lap