Overclocking the EE (discussion) (testers wanted)

[ssakash]

Thanks to all the users and coders for testing/reviewing the EE overclock feature as it was just recently merged a couple minutes ago. #816

you can now use the overclock feature straight away from the latest development builds : http://pcsx2.net/download/development/git.html

If there are any new stuffs needed to be added, feel free to mention. my current priority is to make the slider even more granular by force passing the scale blocks functions rather than limiting the potential by pass checks to have a wider range of overclock / underclock range, (It'd need to be done carefully to make sure that there are no possibilities for encounter of bugs (or) potential issues )

Also a great thanks to Blyss Sarania and Saiki for the provided good code reference to work on for the Overclock function.

[Blyss Sarania]

Sexy.

Glad all the work I put into this finally went somewhere. Thanks for finishing it out ssakash.

[Nobbs66]

Nice! About damn time.

[masterotaku]

Yesssss!!!!! Thanks a lot, everyone who contributed to this   . The feeling of downloading the latest build with this feature included is great.

[willkuer]

Congrats guys! Good work Blyss & ssakash and all the testers. This is really a community driven extension. (even if you two belong to the dark side considering your blue and yellow names...)

[Saiki]

but but... I started the whole mess lol

http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Overclock...#pid433726

[willkuer]

I didn't know. You are actually mentioned in the first post. It's one of the top sentences in that post.

[Vik1ng]

I'm curious about how a playable EDF looks.

[Mkilbride]

Happy to see this finally. I've been saying it for years. So glad to see it went some place. Maybe now Tales of Abyss can be played without slowdowns(It had slowdowns on the PS2)

[karasuhebi]

So does Kingdom Hearts with the 60FPS patch.

• Kingdom Hearts + 60 FPS patch(this makes sense - the game wasn't designed to run at that FPS on real hardware, so even with the 60FPS patch it will drop below 60 and even 30 sometimes. Overclocking the EE mitigates that a bit.)
  

Does it? Interesting! I didn't know that even with the 60 FPS patch the game wouldn't run at 60 FPS all the time. Now that this is merged, time it out.

Thanks for this Blyss Sarania and ssakash!

Well the VU slider doesn't work like the EE slider - it's not really a clock control. I have trouble explaining and understanding it but generally the VU slider lets the VU subsystem steal cycles from the EE in order to dedicate more time to VU stuff.

So wouldn't it stand to reason that if you overclock the EE it might help with performance when you're cranking up the VU cycle hack? At the very least it should make it so that the "fake FPS reporting" (as it seems to be known here in the forums) problem is less pronounced since the EE won't be as starved for cycles.

Just Tested GOW 2 , in 120 FPS. the Result is both astonishing and ludicrous  xD

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4R_JwU...sp=sharing

Edit : i should have added more details about the case, the Game although running at 120 FPS Pre-OC it's at 100% speed, after OC Game goes crazy fast.

Edit 2 : Don't preview the video, download it.

Seeing as how the video was recorded at 60 FPS, we probably wouldn't be able to perceive any increase in FPS through watching the video. Please record another one at 120 FPS.

Anyone else think addoing a list of games that improve from overclocking on the first post is a good idea? Kinda like a tally.

This would help a lot actually when someone's talking about this feature in the 1.4.0 blog post. They won't have to go through all the pages in the thread to compile a games list.

There are 2 independents CPU that communicate with a serial interface (aka SIF) (as any ethernet cable). EE is around 300MHz, IOP is around 40-50MHz. Every time the EE wants to do IO (except graphics), it needs to communicate with the IOP. IOP is very slow, so you can communicate with it asynchronously. So globally the EE creates a thread that fires the IOP transfer and then sleeps waiting the response.

Asynchronous stuff is nice, but often you need the data to continue (MultiThread gameplay is difficult), so I'm sure the EE spends lots of times waiting data from IOP (and potentially othrers DMA transfers). Besides, all this management costs you a lots of extra cycles which doesn't help. So if you overclock the EE CPU, you will spend more time waiting data and therefore, games will be slower (due to your PC limitation). It explains also why both "INTC Spin Detection" and "Wait Loop Detection" improve emulation speed. In the end it might better to overclock the IOP but it will probably break all timings...

Interesting insight! If I understood what you wrote correctly, I think OC'ing the IOP might be something to look into.

Alright I made a decision -

Because it's such a PITA for me to send 99 PMs out every new build, I'm just gonna post them in this thread. The same stuff as before applies though - they are not to be redistributed!

If you ever need to do something like this again, you could always send out a Dropbox folder link (instead of a file link) initially and they will always be able to grab the newest version from there. No need to send out new PMs. Something like this is what I meant:
https://i.imgur.com/QPHAMBW.png

That way whenever they navigate to that link, they will see whatever you put in that folder and will be able to download it.

The way to do is is by creating a folder in your Dropbox folder, then right-clicking on it and clicking on the "Share Dropbox link" option.

Cheers!

The slider now has more positions:
-4 - 50% OC
-3 - 40% OC
-2 - 30% OC
-1 - 20% OC
0 - 10% OC
1 - default
2 - 33% UC
3 - 50% UC

I definitely need much testing for this version - I changed the scalars to floats which means the cycle delays aren't integers now. I expected havoc but I haven't seen any issues - my guess is the maths on the scalars are truncating them to integers at some point anyway. Either way, it works, and adds much finer control to what I can do.

What happened to the these extra slider positions? Don't see them in the dev builds and don't see it mentioned here in the thread what happened to them.