Slowdown issue on gaming PC

[Terrum]

Hi, I just want to start off by saying that I am extremely appreciative towards the developers and other staff members of this community for creating and supporting such a great emulator. Whilst I dread making a thread regarding such a common issue, I cannot seem to solve it myself even after looking through many threads and stickies making sure my hardware was compatible and the games I play.

Unlike many members I've seen posting questions on this forum about slowdowns and other related issues, I have put lots of time into understanding FPS rates (such as PS2s purely needing to run on 50-60FPS), experimenting with settings and trying many different games.

All the games I have tried appear to have the same issue - when more is going on, slowdowns occur. Which I can only think would be an issue with the CPU, as I checked the hardware thread and saw that the i5 was on the list of possible slowdowns. Whilst I understand emulation is never going to be perfect, I've seen better results on machines with Windows XP and only 1GB RAM playing higher resource games like Tekken whilst I'm only playing SpongeBob!

In any case, without babbling on, below is my settings and PC specs. I really have tried fixing it alone and I understand completely that threads like this are generally not wanted due to users not looking for themselves - however I have tried my best at this point and can only apologise for having to bring up this thread:

Settings:
http://imageupper.com/code/?S010001008Y1...5250&links

PC Specs:
Windows 8 Pro with Media Center
Intel i5 750 CPU (2.67GHz 4 Threads, 2 cores)
12GB RAM
HD Radeon 6950 2GB

Any help is extremely appreciated and fully respected!

[Donovan24]

Hi, I just want to start off by saying that I am extremely appreciative towards the developers and other staff members of this community for creating and supporting such a great emulator. Whilst I dread making a thread regarding such a common issue, I cannot seem to solve it myself even after looking through many threads and stickies making sure my hardware was compatible and the games I play.

Unlike many members I've seen posting questions on this forum about slowdowns and other related issues, I have put lots of time into understanding FPS rates (such as PS2s purely needing to run on 50-60FPS), experimenting with settings and trying many different games.

All the games I have tried appear to have the same issue - when more is going on, slowdowns occur. Which I can only think would be an issue with the CPU, as I checked the hardware thread and saw that the i5 was on the list of possible slowdowns. Whilst I understand emulation is never going to be perfect, I've seen better results on machines with Windows XP and only 1GB RAM playing higher resource games like Tekken whilst I'm only playing SpongeBob!

In any case, without babbling on, below is my settings and PC specs. I really have tried fixing it alone and I understand completely that threads like this are generally not wanted due to users not looking for themselves - however I have tried my best at this point and can only apologise for having to bring up this thread:

Settings:
http://imageupper.com/code/?S010001008Y1...5250&links

PC Specs:
Windows 8 Pro with Media Center
Intel i5 750 CPU (2.67GHz 4 Threads, 2 cores)
12GB RAM
HD Radeon 6950 2GB

Any help is extremely appreciated and fully respected!

Which exact games are you tryna play?

[Blyss Sarania]

The problem is your CPU. Your single threaded performance is VERY low.

Comparison:

You: 1134

Me: 1530

Newest intel cpu: ~2000

Can you overclock? Try turning off VU stealing, but leave EE cycle rate at 3. See how that does, that's your best bet.

[Coornio]

Technically the i5 750 is a 4-core model. I have the same one and it's pretty capable in emulation what with turbo boost, so i'm not sure how his CPU is the weak on here.

[Blyss Sarania]

Single threaded performance:

Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.67GHz: 1,134

[willkuer]

Still over 1k is not that bad...

Blyss has probably given the best hints. Don't max the speedhacks unless you know what you are doing. For some games they don't really help. MTVU for example is for some games even a slowdown. The cycle-stealing modes can also create some problems so try using low numbers first.

In general I would say those i5 are really nicely overclockable. If you increase the clock rate to the turbo rate almost nothing can happen if your fan is powerfull enough (in principle almost every fan >20$ and not the boxed fan). Even if you are careless and you overheat the cpu it will throttle itsself (but still try not to be careless). Increasing your cpu to 3.2ghz would probably make a huge difference...

[Terrum]

Thanks all for your helpful responses! If overclocking would make an absolute difference, I could consider this. My mobo has an on-board overclocking feature named 'OC Genie', which I haven't really used the past many years as I haven't needed it - however my CPU currently runs at 65c without overclocking. Would it be safe to overclock? I'd only attempt this if there is a high certainty that overclocking would help with the slowdowns.

I've experimented with many different settings on the speedhacks (unticking/ticking, setting different slider settings) and they don't seem to make any difference at all - so it really does just sound like my CPU.

Most games are playable, so it's not that big a deal - it's just slow and sometimes tedious

Incase this is any help, which it probably isn't, other emulators such as ePSXe run flawlessly.

[Donovan24]

The problem is your CPU. Your single threaded performance is VERY low.

Comparison:

You: 1134

Me: 1530

Newest intel cpu: ~2000

Can you overclock? Try turning off VU stealing, but leave EE cycle rate at 3. See how that does, that's your best bet.

What's your source?

[Blyss Sarania]

Download coretemp and run it. At the bottom you will see Tjmax (the words, not the store ). Anyway this is the max temperature you can hit before throttling. If you are close to it then OC won't help. But if you've got 10+ degrees you can ease up your speed.

---

What's your source?

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

[Donovan24]

Download coretemp and run it. At the bottom you will see Tjmax (the words, not the store ). Anyway this is the max temperature you can hit before throttling. If you are close to it then OC won't help. But if you've got 10+ degrees you can ease up your speed.

---

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

It says your CPU is 1415 not 1530.