Need some help to run Castlevania Curse of Darkness

[MerrazHQ]

Hi people

I'm trying to play Castlevania: Curse of Darkness on the latest version for PCSX2 (which is 1.4.0) but I'm having some performance issues. There are pretty drastical frame drops and slowdown in several areas of the game, I tried enabling and disabling a lot of options for the video configuration and also changing the resolution and some of these changes made the game run better but the performance still leaving some things to wish.

I think I'm just messing up with the video config and doing something wrong, is there anybody who played this game before that can give me some advice to get a better performance for the emulator with this game? I would be much obliged.

[Nobbs66]

pc specs?
settings?
disc or iso?

[MerrazHQ]

pc specs?
settings?
disc or iso?

CPU: Intel Core i5-2300 @2.80GHz (4 cores)
Graphic Card: AMD Radeon HD 6450
RAM: 4,00 GB
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bits

I'm trying to play with an ISO

and I selected the plugin GSdx SSE41 and currently left anything else by default except the MTVU in the speed hacks section which I left enabled

[Nobbs66]

Try using the software renderer. You'll want to add 3 extra rendering threads. the EE cycle rate hack may help as well

[Sukunda]

Try using Direct3D11 (Hardware) in the video plugins tab and make sure resolution is set to native. That's an extremely weak GPU that i've personally used for trying to play games on PCSX2. You could also try overclocking the GPU even by 50 or so MHz and that would be quite an improvement. It's also worth noting that some games ran better in Direct3D9 (Hardware) but for the most part Direct3D11 (Hardware) was faster.

[MerrazHQ]

Try using the software renderer. You'll want to add 3 extra rendering threads. the EE cycle rate hack may help as well

Try using Direct3D11 (Hardware) in the video plugins tab and make sure resolution is set to native. That's an extremely weak GPU that i've personally used for trying to play games on PCSX2. You could also try overclocking the GPU even by 50 or so MHz and that would be quite an improvement. It's also worth noting that some games ran better in Direct3D9 (Hardware) but for the most part Direct3D11 (Hardware) was faster.

Wow, thank you people, now it's working pretty nicely

The EE cycle rate hack actually helped a lot, I didn't want to do anything to that one in a beginning because it looked for me like one of those things that you should never touch since it throws you some warnings in red font when you change it

Also, I hadn't noticed that I was using the Direct3D9 (hardware) all the time, I switch to Direct3D11 (hardware) and looks like this one made it run better too

I also did the overcloking-thing and gave the emulator high priority in the process tree, all this seemed to have helped, indeed

So, just in case, did I do the right thing selecting the video plugin? is there something else that I could do to improve the experience like using another version for the emulator? it's actually fine but I never used an emulator before so I would like to learn about it hehe

thank you again for the help, gotta give some rep

[Nobbs66]

if you aren't getting a solid 60fps, then you could try using an older build like 1.2.1, but we can't really offer any support for it due to its age. As far as selecting the video plugin, you've done fine. If it works, it works.