Persona 3 FES Configuration Help

[nameroc]

Hi,

I'm having trouble playing Persona 3 FES using the latest beta, and could use some help configuring PCSX2, since it's been a while since I used it (last one I remember using was 0.9.4).

My computer specs are:
Intel Quad Q9650 running at 3.0 GHz
3070 MB ram (4 GB physical, but the OS is Vista 32-Bit, so...)
Radeon HD 4870 X2

My PCSX2 settings are attached below. The unshown configs are at their defaults. There is incredible stutter with frame skip, so I just opted to play slowly instead of using the frame skipper. I get 35-45 FPS whenver more than 5 characters are drawn on the screen, and sometimes randomly.

I'd be glad for any assistance you can provide,

nameroc

           

[rama]

Disable all speedhacks, disabled the 2 microVU checkboxes.
The game should run perfectly fine on your machine, with no speedhacks enabled.

[nameroc]

I tried that just now. While it is more stable than before, but the slowdowns haven't gone away. Besides that, the numbers during combat are glitched as well. (I don't remember them being glitched before I turned the speedhacks off, that's odd...)

[marche1990]

actually that is a bug of the GSDx, and AFAIK there is no fix to that yet. the only "way" to fix it is to use an older release of the plugin but... it will sacrifice the speed ups that the newer revisions have, not to mention that they have the infamous ATI bug...
for the boxes that appear under the cpu get everything to 0
and in other things, could you post a screenshot when the slowdowns happen? in windowed mode, please, and make sure that everything regarding the window appear

[nameroc]

Sure. With all the speed hacks turned off, and the CPU config numbers set to 0 (it's at limit anyway. If I use frameskip, I get lots of flickering and it won't go above 50-54 in most cases anyway even with frameskip) here are the screenshots of some slowdowns.
                   

And here's one with barely any slowdown, but it was as slow as the others when there was a dialog box up on the screen. Couldn't get it to slow down again by talking, so I just took a pic of the scene.
   

Haven't met any slowdowns in battles, but some looking around some corners in Tartarus also slow down the frame rate.

[Koji]

Just an aside, you may want to turn 16:9 off since Persona 3 doesn't support that aspect ratio. The game is running really stretched. That won't have anything to do with speed... just wanted to point out that though.

For the game itself, I almost always get slowdowns in the same places (Athlon x2 5000 @ 2.9ghz). While your CPU is a quad, PCSX2 only uses at most 2 cores which puts our systems pretty close. Your clockrate may just be a little low for those scenes.

[nameroc]

Heh, I was wondering why everyone in the game looked short and chubby. I guess it didn't occur to me to change the aspect ratio.

But still, I recall playing this game at full speed using a few speed hacks with an older version... I might try the older builds again later on.

[marche1990]

hmmm.... funny how with my machine I got more or less the same speed than you in some of those scenes... what GSDx plugin are you using? SSSE3? I can't see why it is slow in your machine, damn... do you have your machine in power saving mode?

[Koji]

Marche: What level of Cycle Stealing are you using though? I could get 60fps 100% of the time if I have it set above moderate, but at the cost of my entire game playing slower.

[marche1990]

I posted my speedhacks, and a comparison screenshot. As you can see, my bottleneck is the CPU, and that's why I don't know how he, with a faster cpu, can get speeds so slow
   
   
   
   
I posted my settings and a comparison screenshot, to see if it helps anyone