(09-27-2021, 09:28 PM)JoseSuarez Wrote: My specs are:
CPU i5-4430
GPU GTX 1050 Ti manually overclocked
8GB RAM
2TB HDD
PCSX2 v1.7.0 dev-1285
I followed the wiki's settings to a T, so I'm using OpenGL and all the settings it points to while keeping the rest to default. I put the resolution on 4x (1440p) and it is completely flawless until more than 2 AGWS or big machine-type enemies appear on screen. I tried dropping the resolution down to 1x (native) but the speed is still at 70%, exactly the same as it is in 4x. Changing the backend to D3D11 didn't solve it either, though it went up to 84%. If it isn't a resolution issue, what can I do to improve the speed? EE Cycle skipping set to 1 reports near 99% speed, but in-game is still slow as hell. Any ideas?
I wrote a pretty extensive test of Xenosaga Episode 3. I went on to play Episode 1 as well, but I didn't write down and post my results here, but pretty similar settings seemed to work. I have a Ryzen 4700 APU with integrated graphics, so I think I have a better CPU than you (probably) but not a better GPU. The Xenosaga series are known for being very CPU-bound.
Here are a few "highlights" to improve performance from my testing that might help you:
1) Use the Aggressive CRC hack. It removes sepia tone filters from cutscenes, but otherwise, it solves a lot of problems.
2) Speed hacks generally don't do much but cause glitches. The MTVU multi-threading hack fixed some issues caused by the Aggressive CRC hack for some reason. Using the CD speedup hack seemed to help a little, as well as the wait-loop detection hack. MVU flag hack caused glitches I didn't like.
3) Don't include anything that doesn't improve the image. Anisotropic Filtering does nothing, this game uses fixed camera angles, so extreme angles aren't shown anyhow. Dithering didn't seem to improve anything. The main thing that improves the image is anti-aliasing, keeping blending accuracy at medium, and keeping mip-mapping. Mostly keep the defaults, just turn off the things that don't make a noticeable difference.
4)
DO NOT use auto-flushing of textures. Big slowdown for me. Disable safe-features. Force-disabling half-screen fix worked for some people but not for me ever. Turn on tri-linear filtering. Set half-pixel offset to "special (texture). Game didn't seem to like edge anti-aliasing on my Intel computer, but it works just fine on my AMD.
5) For you, checking boxes that shift the load from GPU to CPU might help, since this is a CPU-heavy game. When you hover your cursor over the text for each option, it explains what each option does.
6) Also, the Xenosaga games are notorious for the memory card function not working. Files get corrupted easily, and if you even try to access the in-game save point, the game will crash completely. The 1.70 development version appears to have mostly fixed this, but make sure you have the most cutting edge development version as these issues seems to have been fixed only this year. I'd recommend using the Save State function integrated into PCSX2 rather than relying on the memory card. If you do want to use in game saves, I noticed that
turning off NTFS compression in the PCSX2's memory card menu helped make them more reliable. Even the natively ran game would occasionally corrupt save states, so PCSX2 is emulating a bug, which just makes the bug even buggier. The game when run natively would also show some slowdowns transitioning from one cutscene to another, which PCSX2 does better with but will still sometimes show.
