Wild Arms 3 - Faster in software mode
#1
(Computer Specs posted below)
When playing Wild Arms 3 I run into a variety of choke points when using Direct3D hardware. These are mainly pan outs in battle, extreme close ups on characters, and I believe some text boxes .

I am using the August release of GSDX SSE2 in the native resolution. I have played with the GS settings (including allowing 8 bit textures) and speed hacks. Unfortunately I still run into these choke points where I get ~20 fps while both my EE and GS percent are 20-30. During others scenes (when EE or GS are 100%) I get 100-200 fps.

I can run the game in Direct3D software and get about 50-60 fps during scenes where hardware got a slow 20 fps or fast 200 fps. In other words speed is much more consistent. I would like to mention that with software GS is always 100%. I assume that is normal, but I have no idea.

Whats more, the speed at these choke points is the same speed I got with an old Pentium4 3.0GHz with hyper threading and a Geforce5900 Ultra. The difference was with that rig EE and GS were both constantly ~100%.

Any advice on something I'm missing (ex. limitations of the emulator, the workings of EE and GS percent, lesser known setting, limitations of my hardware) would be greatly appreciated. Also, please let me know if I did not include enough information or if an expert believes this is bug report worthy. Thank you.

Windows XP 32
AMD Atholon II X2 3.0GHz - OC'ed to 3.5GHz
HD 4200 integrated graphics 500Mhz core, 400MHz memory, memory bit width 64 - OC'ed to 750MHz core
2GB DDR3 memory 1066MHz - OC'ed to 1500MHz

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#2
You have a very very slow graphics card and it's even slower since you can't use the D3D10 renderer in GSdx, wild arms 3 is pretty demanding on that so it's not surprising that your much faster CPU runs it better in software.

You can try frameskip which could help with speed on both cases (Shift+F4 while playing).
Core i5 3570k -- Geforce GTX 670  --  Windows 7 x64
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#3
I think you can get a free speed boost by setting the skipdraw hack in GSdx to "1".
Please search the forum on how to do that Wink
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#4
Lets start with the good news. Setting skipdraw to "2" makes the game run faster than 60 fps in most previously tested scenes. In fact, it usually runs over 100 fps with only occasional and brief slowdowns below 60. So thank you very much rama.

And Shadow Lady, I honestly thought that my over clocked 4200 would be comparable to the recommended 4750. Shows how much I know about GPU's. Anyway, thank you for the toggle frameskip idea.

P.S. overall a higher percentage of EE and GS are being used, with one or the other bottle necking every so often
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#5
Integrated graphic processors do not fare well with PCSX2.
Other than that, you should be alright, it's just that your processor is only one magnitude above a Pentium 4 w/ HT in a sense... Only one core of your Athlon X2 is used for the EE.

As for the GS, it should be sufficient.
CPU: Pentium D 'Presler' 915 2.8 ghz 2x2MB L2 @ 3.5 ghz
GPU: eVGA [Nvidia] 8600GT 256MB SSC DDR3
Tested: FFX, FFX-2, FFXII, MGS3, KH, KH2, The Hobbit NTSC
PCSX2 FTW! Biggrin
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#6
(10-06-2010, 07:46 AM)dandan Wrote: And Shadow Lady, I honestly thought that my over clocked 4200 would be comparable to the recommended 4750. Shows how much I know about GPU's. Anyway, thank you for the toggle frameskip idea.

Unlike overclocking a CPU (and even then depending of the architecture of the CPU), the overclock in GPUs help very little most of the time, specially with the lower end cards.
Core i5 3570k -- Geforce GTX 670  --  Windows 7 x64
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