Question about INTC Sync Hack and Persona 4

[Bright-Warrior]

I now looked after this and I think, you are right. The highest number for the GS cpu usage was 47%, with an usage of my cpu at about 75% - 80%.

Ok then Rama's right. The game's just very CPU intensive and, chances are, the PAL version is bit more cpu intensive than the NTSC version (since this is very common among many PAL conversions).

OK, good to hear. This would also explain why cottonvibes reaches about the same percantage with microVU as I with superVU. Perhaps he even has a bit more^^. But I now want to find out how big the difference between PAL and NTSC here really is and ordered the us version. I saw it cheap on ebay, so at it^^. Perhaps this might help you guys as well.

I also noticed something odd. You can see it in the first picture. At the moment Yukiko is summoning the Charming Prince, the console of PCSX2 prints a "PS2RNA: Warning". I never noticed this before, but I also play with fullscreen sometimes. I tried this multiple times and it always occured when she is summing him. For the second picture this did not happen, but I honestly don't know what kind of warning this is.

Ignore it. It's just a debug message output by one of the game's internal libraries. Most of the time they're meant to be performance or "possible source of bugs" type warnings to the game's original developers, and are disregarded because "fixing" the code to avoid the warning was too much work or the specific scenario where the warning occurs is known to be harmless.

(yes, PCSX2 emulates the PS2's dev console output )

Now I like PCSX2 even more^^. Hopefully, I'll be able to see some more of them^^. It is so sad that the source code of PS2 games can't be seen, I would love to look into some games.

Have you seen the note I just added to my post? I edited it two times. Here it is again:

"Note: I looked at the activity of my gpu and was pertty surprised: I don't know if this is normal, since I don't look at this all the time, but in the battle with Yukiko, the activity went unusualy high, at about 51%. Normally, it has about 36%, like in the second picture. Could this be a hint for a ATI problem as well?"

But this doesn't seem to be problematic, does it?

[Bright-Warrior]

I'm reviving this thread, if you don't mind, because I want to say something about what we discussed here recently.

PAL and NTSC games do the same amount of work (usually), so you'll get the same percentage of slowdown.[...]

My NTSC copy arrived today and I ran to the part of the boss battle with Yukiko, to compare fps. Well, the result is different from what you said. The PAL version gives me about 46 fps, which are 93%. But NTSC gives me about 48 fps, which are 81%. And it also seemed to me, that these versions doesn't need the same amouth of work to get a specific percentage of fps. Or, let me say it differently: PCSX2 renders them with about the same fps (NTSC a bit more), but they are limited by the framelimiter, which is 50 fps for PAL and 60 fps for NTSC. But, in a scene I got, where the PAL version went smooth, NTSC is slowing down a bit. At least that's what I experienced. This seems to be, because the game renders this scene with about 56 fps (that's what the framelimiter of NTSC told me). With PAL, I'm not noticing this, but with NTSC. So the percentage of slowdown doesn't seem to be the same, it seems to depend on the fps the PC is able to render the scene at.

So, is the game behaving differently from what you thought or did I just got your sentence wrong?

[rama]

Nah, I just never made any tests with VU stressing games
It's not a good idea to generalize that though. The next game could behave differently already.
Or it could be that the 2 versions of Persona 4 have more differences than just the video timing.

[Air]

It's also possible that the NTSC version is more friendly toward speedhacks than the PAL version. Ie, the PAL version may run very poorly (like slow motion) with too many speedhacks, while the NTSC version may be much less affected.