Primal EE and GS Issues

[roxxas2]

Hi all,

I'm trying to play Primal. I've downloaded the latest SVN build and tweaked the best I can. I have noticed the EE and GS utilization during the beginning and while the EE was at 99% the GS was at around 3-6%. I'm guessing that has something to do with the 20-40 FPS count and the extreme laggy audio and video. Is there any way to maybe put the load back on the GS? Is there some sort of option I maybe missed?

Also, it said on the compadability list that Primal was fully playable. What happened?

Thanks

EDIT: My specs:
Intel Core i7 2600k @4.5GHz
16GB Corsair @2800MHz
XFX Ati Radeon HD 6870@1GHz (Crossfire)

[natt]

Fully playable doesn't necessarily mean fast.

If you're cpu-limited with EE, turning on the MTVU speedhack might work.

[soratidus999]

with an i7 you should definetely be using the MTVU hack on almost every game,

[roxxas2]

I'm not really CPU limited... I have a Core i7 2600k... That's 8 logical processors, and they're all clocked at 4.5GHz. But yeah, I already enabled the MTVU speedhack.

[miseru99]

The visible % show thread load over cpu, if any is hitting 99-100% you ARE cpu limited and obviously if you are limited by one thing, the other is waiting for it's turn / doesn't have anything to do and soo the load on other threads decreases - that's completely normal and that's how it should be;].
Unless you messed something within your config doesn't really matter how powerfull your cpu is, if you tried the speedhacks and other speed affecting options already, it means it's still too slow to play this game. Also stop with the marketing bs, it's a normal i7 quad;].

[avih]

This game currently plays very slow, relatively. There are no tweaks that I know of to make it considerably faster.

[roxxas2]

Hm well do you know if it's possible to maybe speed up the EE? Maybe overclock it? lol

[Squall Leonhart]

its not a matter of overclocking the EE, which would only really be of benefit if the game on the console was slow

[mindinsomnia]

This was one of the first games I tried to get running on PCSX2, and to this day I've only been able to get about 20-40fps, with the occasional golden moment of 50. But that's with a tonne of hacks enabled, almost to the point of making it unplayable. My CPU is a 6 core/3.7GHz, my computer's CPU is no where near what could be considered 'slow', just like yours. Though with your 4.5GHz clock, you should be able to get a little better than 20-40.

The issue seems to be that games like Primal make extensive use of the VU0, instead of the VU1. You can test this by turning the VUs (VU0/VU1) settings from Recompiler to Interpreter, you'll see that the VU0 being set to interpreter has a massive impact, while the VU1 has a much lesser impact. Hence the MTVU hack doesn't achieve anything in this game's case, since it multithreads the VU1 and not the VU0. Which apparently is impossible/near impossible to multithread to a separate thread away from the EE.

So basically there's nothing you can do to fix the problem, unless you can overclock your CPU to 9GHz to double your fps

Other than that, just wait and hope (and donate occasionally, nothin' like good ol' bribery to make the wheels turn) like me that the PCSX2 team come up with some brilliant idea to fix the problem.

In the mean time, I recommend the following settings: (These work for me, while remaining playable mostly)

EE
- Round Mode: Nearest
- Clamping Mode: None
VU0:
- superVU Recompiler (I have no idea why, but I get an extra 1-2fps with this turned on, weird huh?)
VU1:
- microVU Recompiler
VU0/VU1 Advanced:
- Round Mode: Nearest
- Clamping Mode: None
Speedhacks:
- EE Cyclerate: 2
- VU Cycle Stealing: 0
- mVU Flag Hack: Enabled
- MTVU : Enabled (Can't hurt right?)
Other Hacks:
- I've found enabling all or none of these has little impact on performance for obvious reasons.
Note: These settings will result in bugs, but so far haven't found anything which stopped me from playing the game.

As for the GS settings, it doesn't matter on my system if I set it to native resolution or 6x resolution, regardless the fps is about the same. Although I did have to use an older version of the GS to get hardware mode working on my system. If you're using software mode on the GS because you can't get the hardware mode to work, that may have a slight impact (not much admittedly), and could be fixed by reverting back to the 4600 build version of the GSDX plugin.

Also, I get about 18fps on the first cutscene, and about 30-40fps while in the game. So be sure to get past the cutscene and get to the first world (the wintery place, can't remember the name) before judging the performance.

Best of luck! Hope you get it running smoothly! :3

Hope any or all of that helps!

[dhillel]

I Found this and used it to play the game Primal a year ago, it might still help:

The game is just very very slow, only way to get better speed without breaking much is going into the pcsx2_vm.ini file and set the FramerateNTSC or FrameratePAL lines to half or something (Default is 59.94/50.0), then you'll get decent speed but only do it for this game as those settings are certainly going to break other games.