Slowdowns from particle effects?
#1
I've noticed some very short but severe slowdowns (5-10fps) on games which otherwise run at a stable 50/60 fps, particularly when a significant portion of the screen is immersed in particles. This includes the fire truck in GTA: San Andrea throwing water in your direction, the light beams from the stained glass in the Wizards and Lizards stage of Wrath of Cortex and the red particles from the blades of chaos in GOW2 (sq, sq, sq, tri at the screen).

None of my fiddling around did any good, but I'm just wondering why this happens.

But a solution would be good too...Ninja
1.1.0
Gsdx: http://i.imgur.com/udhPu.png

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel i5-3570k @ 3.40Ghz
Nvidia GeForce GTX670 DirectCU II
8Gb Ram
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#2
That's a sign the video card is already struggling to give those values, assuming they are for PAL and NTSC respectively and not that is varying around it.

Without the computer specs information is hard to say.

You may want to try speedhacks and/or reduce the internal resolution.

Edit: If the particles are emulated in CPU as well, the problem may be sheer lack of CPU power, again, please post your CPU specs to get further help, giving us PCSX2 settings would help us helping you also.
Imagination is where we are truly real
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#3
What's your gpu and how much vram does it has?
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#4
Its not really about the amount of Vram a card has but rather its core speed.
I5 3570k 3.4ghz| 4GB R9 290| 8GB DDR3
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#5
I have that problem with the intro in Jak 3, when running in software mode. When it throws particles all over the place, my computer starts sounding like a vacuum, and the game slows to about 45-50 fps. It's going to happen no matter what.
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#6
(11-17-2012, 12:16 AM)The Walking Glitch Wrote: I have that problem with the intro in Jak 3, when running in software mode. When it throws particles all over the place, my computer starts sounding like a vacuum, and the game slows to about 45-50 fps. It's going to happen no matter what.

That's because software mode uses, for the most part, the CPU. Hardware mode uses the GPU and can help determine what is going on.
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#7
Something I have not pointed out clearly, the reason I brought this up was because I was interested to know why particle effects caused such a dip in performance on a system that handles the games in question at max fps. I had the idea these kinds of effects required negligible resources comparatively, but then again I'm ignorant on these things. The reason for the slowdown is clear, I run it at 6x native res as I get a stable 60 fps on every game I own, which is why I was surprised to see the brief dip in performance over ocean sprays, light rays and such.

3x native is when smashing the blades in GOW2 in the screen's direction does not cause fps to budge from 60, for me.

Just in case my specs are, i5-3570k @ 3.40, GTX670, 8gb ram, Win7-64 and running PCSX2 1.1.0-5451
[Image: ZLFoL.png]
1.1.0
Gsdx: http://i.imgur.com/udhPu.png

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel i5-3570k @ 3.40Ghz
Nvidia GeForce GTX670 DirectCU II
8Gb Ram
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#8
In my case, in native games, and emulated games, I get slow downs when there are excessive particles on my screen. Even in MineCraft with a server running on another computers, blowing tons of TNT still brought my GPU to its knees trying to render the ridiculous amount of particles. I would imagine that the issue is only magnified in emulated games. Just my guess though, and I have not looked at any of the code myself for pcsx2, and don't know the specifics of the games, so at best my guess is that, an educated guess.
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#9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_effect

Particles are pretty demanding...
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#10
GTX670 13 gigapixels per second 86 gigatexels per second
GPUs can texture a lot faster than they do particles where its the opposite on the PS2.
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