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Speed Hacks tab of the Emulation Settings:
Speed hacks are various techniques used to speed up emulation at the cost of emulating accuracy. All of these options can and will cause severe bugs, crashes and other abnormal behavior so use them with caution! Also note that these affect certain games only, so you might not get any speed up depending on the game. Below we'll describe the settings available to us:
Enable speedhacks: Check/uncheck this for a quick toggle to turn on/off all selected hacks below.
Emotion Engine (EE) Cyclerate: This hack increase the time an emulated operation takes, thus the task is easier to do for your CPU. Anything other than default can break your games, make them appear sluggish or make them start skipping frames.
Default Cycle Rate - Slider Level 1: This is not a hack, this will emulate the EE on its actual speed.
Slider Level 2: Reduces the EE cycle rate by 33%. Moderate speed increase, small compatibility hit.
Slider Level 3: Reduces the EE cycle rate by 50%. Big speed increase, moderate compatibility hit. Also can cause stuttering audio in game videos.
VU Cycle Stealing: This hack increases the number of cycles the Vector Unit (VU) steals from the Emotion Engine (EE). This hack can and will cause false FPS readings (especially in higher values), screen flashing, slowdowns and other serious bugs with certain games!
Slider Level 0: This is not a hack, this will disable VU Cycle Stealing.
Slider Level 1: Small speed increase, small compatibility hit.
Slider Level 2: Big speed increase, moderate compatibility hit.
Slider Level 3: Small speed increase compared to level 2, huge compatibility hit. This level will not work properly for the majority of games causing flickering, slowdowns and graphical bugs while offering a marginal speed increase over level 2 when it works. Not recommended except for very few specific games that work well with it.
Other Hacks: Various hacks with different usability.
Enable INTC Spin detection: This hack takes a shortcut in a known situation PS2 games do when they idle, check the tooltip for a detailed explanation. Instead of doing the idle loop it just jumps to its end and continues from there. Can give big speed boosts but only in a few games. Very safe hack with almost no compatibility hit, recommended.
Enable Wait Loop detection: Similar method to the above, check the tooltip for a detailed explanation. Moderate speed up with no known compatibility hit, recommended.
Enable fast CDVD: Reduces loading times by setting a faster disc access mode. Check the HDLoader compatibility list for games that will NOT work with this (usually marked as needing mode 1 or slow DVD). Not recommended since it can break many games.
microVU Hacks: These hacks are only applied when microVU is selected as the recompiler in the VU tab of Emulation settings. If superVU is selected, these hacks do nothing.
mVU Flag Hack: Check the tooltip for a detailed description about how this works. Moderate speed increase with very high compatibility, recommended.
MTVU (Multi-Threaded microVU1): Check this to use a third core for emulating the VU1 unit of the PS2. This speed hack provides a large speed boost for processors with 3 cores or more, while having extremely high compatibility (causes problems only in a handful of games). Note that some games might not get a good speed increase (depends how much they use the VU1 unit). There are also reports of speed boosts even on dual core processors.
Restore defaults: Click this to restore all settings to their default values (which actually disables all hacks in this tab).