Please help, rendering issues

[Bukinnear]

Ok, I'm fairly new to PCSX2, so please excuse me if I make mistakes.

I'm trying to run Ratchet and Clank 3, it works, but only just. The game plays all right, but it's as slow as hell and I think rendering is the problem. Most cut scenes are just fine (except ones that involve a large of long distance rendering) but in game long distance rendering (ie. anything further than about a meter from my character in game) is screwy. it renders badly, meaning a lotta funky colors and in most cases just looks like a lot of snow on an old school TV.

Now, I can accept that my computer may not be good enough, only thing is, I built it myself to play games and even ignoring that for a second, my GPU doesn't even come close to maxing out and my CPU never even maxes even a single core (to my knowledge PCSX2 only uses 2 cores anyway).

My computer specs are as follows:

Windows 7 Home Premium SP1
AMD Phenom x6 1090T Black Edition @ 3.2 GHz (stock speeds)
VTX3D Radeon HD 6950 @ 920 MHz
8Gb G.Skill Ram

I am also using the latest of PCSX2 (0.9.8)

Is this an AMD, CPU, GPU or PCSX2 problem? Or do my specs just not cut it? (That would be weird, because as I said, I'm not maxing a single one of them).

Much appreciated

   

[refraction]

press F9 duing play and all will be solved

[Bukinnear]

Ok, problem one down. That helps with the rendering, but when it's on the best rendering its too slow and when on the worst rendering its quite playable. I suppose that's an indication that my system isn't cutting it then? Time for that crossfire configuration I've been wanting, methinks.

[refraction]

unfortunately crossfire wont help you too much.

with Rachet and clank, best thing you can have as a system

Quare core i5 or i7 processor running at about 4Ghz.

GSDX in software mode and ~3 rendering threads.
Latest SVN build of PCSX2 with MTVU enabled
VU Cycle Stealing speedhack up a couple of notches and all the recommended speed hacks on
All clamping set to "none" or "normal"

That will get you pretty reasonable performance you can probably do the settings side of it now but it will be slow on your AMD chip (overclock that bad boy!)

[Bukinnear]

Excellent, ive been meaning to OC it for a while now but havnt really had the need to. I'll give it a shot and see how it goes.

Thanks for the help

[ffm_strife]

unfortunately crossfire wont help you too much.

with Rachet and clank, best thing you can have as a system

Quare core i5 or i7 processor running at about 4Ghz.

GSDX in software mode and ~3 rendering threads.
Latest SVN build of PCSX2 with MTVU enabled
VU Cycle Stealing speedhack up a couple of notches and all the recommended speed hacks on
All clamping set to "none" or "normal"

That will get you pretty reasonable performance you can probably do the settings side of it now but it will be slow on your AMD chip (overclock that bad boy!)

What's clamping? I feel bad for asking so many questions, but I feel like a child who just discovered a new and amazing toy

[refraction]

in the emulation settings, under the ee/iop and vu settings you have "clamping" which stops numbers overflowing (doesnt really affect ratchet and clank!) so its okay to have them, set to none, makes things a little quicker

[Millor]

I just got this game as well, rendering fixed with f9, turning off clamping did seem to help a bit.

For speed hacks VU cycle stealing at 2 is a must, microVU hacks don't make a difference that I can perceive, EE cyclerate at 3 is best, INTC spin detection and wait loop detection make slight improvements I belive. Some how I feel as if the sprite hack some how makes the game sligthly smoother but at the same time it also feels like it may just be some sort of placebo effect and it may not actually be doing anything lol. May want to just bump up the base frame rate to like 110% or so to speed the game up overall.

The game is still a bit slow in outside locations and the down throttling when going from inside to outside is the worst part, and I really don't see how to improve performance any better. I really don't think over clocking is going to help, at least not in this case, it's just a game known to go slow on PCSX2. Turning up the speed to like 150% or something will make it decent enough to play, but you probably won't want to listen to the music because it will be going way faster and it sounds horrible.

[Bukinnear]

Yea, thanks for that. I suppose the alternative is to actually go out and buy another PS2 and the game, but I really don't want to