Strange Performance Problems

[Nickd91]

The other day I posted a thread, reporting some strange performance bug I was having in Dragon Quest 8. Today I decided to play Okami and ran into the exact same issue, making me realize it is probably not related to the game itself.

The problem can cause a severe crash in performance, depending on what the current internal resolution is at. I generally play at 3-4x Native, which can take me from 200% emulation speed with EE at roughly 20-50% and GS roughly the same, to 50% emulation speed with low EE usage and roughly 100% GS usage.

I originally thought this was related to the turbo and frame limit controls but this turns out to not be the case as it happens when running at normal (100%) emulation speed as well.

I have all of my emulation settings set to the Safe preset, but have also reproduced it with the Safest and Balanced presets. It also occurs whether or not Multi-threaded MicroVU1 speed hack is on.

With the video plugins, I have tried all of the hardware renderers and have reproduced the issue with them all. I have tried it with various settings, hardware hacks on/off, different bi-linear filtering and anisotropic filtering settings, shaders always off, CRC Hack level Full for D3D11 and D3D9, while Partial with OpenGL.

The problem can be temporarily alleviated by moving the mouse, or toggling frame limiter or turbo. There may be other ways but these are what I have found.

I use PCSX2 release build 1.4 mainly, but I have the issue on the current beta builds for 1.5 as well. 

Has anyone else been having or had this issue? I did not have this issue until recently, but I can't pinpoint the cause either. Any help regarding this issue is greatly appreciated. I think I will be redownloading the PCSX2 files later to make sure none of my files are corrupted, if for no other reason than to rule this out as the cause.

I have been using PCSX2 for roughly 3 years and this is the only issue I have really had, that bugged me into making an account an seeking support anyway.

TL;DR
Strange bug causes my performance to tank, it is able to be fixed temporarily, but having my performance tank repeatedly sucks. Help if you can!

[Topken]

All I can say is check to see if there is something eating up CPU usage in the background with Task Manager. Also check your temps while playing and see if the CPU throttles down.

[Nickd91]

All I can say is check to see if there is something eating up CPU usage in the background with Task Manager. Also check your temps while playing and see if the CPU throttles down.

Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately now the problem that has been plaguing me has disappeared as quickly as it came, and I have no idea why. Nothing is different as far as I can tell. The only thing running in the background was chrome with 1-2 tabs and inputmapper to use my DS4 controller. Neither of which was using a noteworthy amount of resources.

[tsunami2311]

what exactly is your computers specs?

[Nickd91]

what exactly is your computers specs?

None of them really reach any upper limits during gameplay. I checked for overheating as well, no dice.
Also, in an earlier post I had said the problem had disappeared. This was not the case, its occurrence time just changed from roughly every 30s to 1min, to 1 or 2 times in a 30 minute period.

Windows 10
Intel i5 4690k @ 4GHz
Nvidia GTX 970 @ 1164 MHz
8 GB DDR3 RAM

[tsunami2311]

is your GPU set to adaptive or max performance in nvcp?, PCSX2 some times uses the GPU in idle mode speeds if adaptive, dont know if still does or not cause I force max performance in global of NVCP for years now.

IF gpu is running idle speeds it could be why.

also make sure your CPU is running full speed not idle speeds, I had pcsx2 do that too, again dont know pcsx2 still does that either, It been 5+ years since I used speedstep and it dynamic speeds

[Nickd91]

is your GPU set to adaptive or max performance in nvcp?, PCSX2 some times uses the GPU in idle mode speeds if adaptive, dont know if still does or not cause I force max performance in global of NVCP for years now.

IF gpu is running idle speeds it could be why.

also make sure your CPU is running full speed not idle speeds, I had pcsx2 do that too, again dont know pcsx2 still does that either, It been 5+ years since I used speedstep and it dynamic speeds

I have never noticed this option in nvcp, however it was set to power savings, I have never had issues with it before but I will take your advice and set it to max performance instead to see if this is the root cause.
Truly thank you for the heads up on this option, if I had known about it earlier it would have been set there anyway as the GPU will clock up and down as it is needed anyway.

[tsunami2311]

I have never noticed this option in nvcp, however it was set to power savings, I have never had issues with it before but I will take your advice and set it to max performance instead to see if this is the root cause.
Truly thank you for the heads up on this option, if I had known about it earlier it would have been set there anyway as the GPU will clock up and down as it is needed anyway.

yah driver defaults adaptive for global profiles. I had issue where native PC game suffered cause that adaptive too, so  I always put global  profile Power Management Mode to max performance

[Nickd91]

yah driver defaults adaptive for global profiles. I had issue where native PC game suffered cause that adaptive too, so  I always put global  profile Power Management Mode to max performance

Unfortunately that did not seem to be the cause of this issue, it seems more like the GPU gets into a state where it is waiting for something to happen, not like a standby mode but more like it is waiting on information it does not have? If that makes any sense.

[tsunami2311]

might want to show us all the pcsx2 settings then