So the EE Slider.

[Ryudo]

I'm getting mixed reactions on this. According to the tooltip you can get a boost in FPS whether you slide it left or right, but ssakash mentioned it increases the smoothness of the game if you move it to the right. What should I interpret 'smoothness' as? Are we talking about a potential fake 60 FPS feeling here or something else? Won't that actually DECREASE performance? I'm still a bit confused by this one lol.

[vsub]

The only difference I saw till now is that going in/out of battles\towns and moving the camera in Tales of the Abyss is much faster(no stuttering and no long waiting when you world map<=>battle)

I have yet to see that "smoother" gameplay everyone is talking about...I don't see any difference in KH2FM too without using the 60fps patch

[ssakash]

Ryudo: The accurate explanation is that moving the slider to right side effectively increases the Clock speed of the Emotion Engine which in turn means emulating the PS2 where the EE is clocked at an even higher clock speed.

due to this,

benefits : you can play games where the PS2 struggled due to bottleneck from the EE by using the overclocked option at the slider (+1 , +2 ) to play it even better. which in turn means you need more resources from the processor since you're emulating the EE with an even higher clockspeed then it's by default. ( hence the reason why it's more demanding)

though if you have a processor which is strong enough to handle the extra demand on resources then you'll observe an improvement on the real FPS. ( layman term : smoothness )

the overclock would only yield benefit on situations where the EE Core CPU (R5900) is bottlenecking the console from achieving better performance.

[ssakash]

Alternatively , the underclock option -1 , -2 do the opposite. It's useful for games which don't make use of the full potential of the EE. so we're decreasing it's clock speed which in turn means we need less resources from the processor to actually emulate the EE.

to dumb up my explanations, here are examples of the scenarios ideal for using the underclock / overclock options:

Underclock:

usage of EE on the game : 70%   (it's clearly not used fully)

default cycle rate : 100% ( we're emulating the EE at it's default clock speed so the remaining 30% is just waste of processor resources)

set slider to -1 :  70% ( we're emulating the EE with a naturally lower clock speed which should mean lower requirement of processor resources and we're happy since it's enough for the following game and we're saving some resources which should yield a good speedup. whee ! )

Overclock:

usage of EE on the game : 100% ( clearly the EE seems to be pushed to it's limits and which in turn makes the console to underperform at certain scenarios due to this bottleneck)

Default cycle rate: 100% ( In this case underclock wouldn't help since the game needs more from the EE so Default cyclerate would reproduce the same behavior as the console)

set slider to +1 : 130% ( we're increasing the emulated clock speed which would mean need for more processor resources but the EE can actually perform better at these scenarios due to the increase in clock speed ! so when you have a processor which can handle these higher demand in resources you should see a benefit. since you're emulating a whole virtual state of the console with a higher clocked processor which could cope better on demanding scenes. )

If you still have any further doubts I'll give you some RL practical example referencing to something similar to this.

[Blyss Sarania]

Ssakash nailed it. To the right(overclock) increases internal FPS(smoothness) e.g. the FPS of the in game image that we don't have a counter for. To the left(underclock) will decrease internal FPS(smoothness) but increase emulation speed(the FPS we have a counter for).

Basically places where games stutter and drop frames can be improved if the bottleneck is the EE by going to the right. It makes things more demanding though. If you download the source video of my demo ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkn34noffstj3v...d.mp4?dl=1 ) you can really see it. Especially at the end of the Ratchet and Clank one - the left side(normal clock) drops lots of frames but the right side (overclock) is smooth. It's also fairly obvious in the opening of the SotC section. It's not a MASSIVE difference, but if you have CPU time to spare it's a nice boost in smoothness.

Consider them opposites of each other.

Left=Underclock=More Speed=Less smooth
Right=Overclock=Less Speed=More smooth

If you've ever used the EE underclock then you have likely observed that while it lightens requirements, it can also cause the games to drop frames and be more jerky. The EE overclock is exactly the opposite.

BTW rama once told me that our default EE is just slightly underclocked compared to the PS2 one. Because of that a few games drop FPS in PCSX2 where they wouldn't on real PS2. That's why I'd really like to see more granularity in the slider. @ssakash, weren't you looking in to that?

[Ryudo]

I never actually had to use speedhacks a lot before so it's interesting at least.

Did the old EE slider work the same way in terms of speedup on your computer and smoothness in-game? (When you slide it to the left that is).


I guess it might be really handy for games like Tales of the Abyss that was previously mentioned. I remember the atrocious loading times between towns and world maps. And actually fighting on the world map as well. (Took ages even on PSCX2).

[vsub]

I always use holy bottles on the world map because of that...sometimes on my PS2 the game even freeze couple of times(battles in the world map...especially in the desert)

[Blyss Sarania]

I never actually had to use speedhacks a lot before so it's interesting at least.

Did the old EE slider work the same way in terms of speedup on your computer and smoothness in-game? (When you slide it to the left that is).


I guess it might be really handy for games like Tales of the Abyss that was previously mentioned. I remember the atrocious loading times between towns and world maps. And actually fighting on the world map as well. (Took ages even on PSCX2).

Overclock can help with load times if assets are being decompressed on the EE(which happens sometimes).

Yes the left is pretty much the same as the old EE slider. I think it has a minor tweak.

Think of it in this simple terms: It's literally a clock speed slider. Left is lower, right is higher. So it will cause anything that is being done on the EE to be faster when it's to the right and slower to the left. Since we are emulating the virtual EE, the requirements are also tied to that - left is lower requirement, right is higher.

[vsub]

It's like you are upgrading the cpu of your PS2 with a faster one

[Blyss Sarania]

Yep.