I have a Phenom II X4 965 @ stock speed (3.4Ghz) and I tried two games, shadow of the colossus and vice city stories, both games run well intially, but as soon as there's a larger vista or anything it dips as low as 30 and 20 and the speedhacks barely help, ther's a bunch of EE and VU options that I haven't touched tho, am I doing something wrong?
Shadow of the Colossus is pretty CPU demanding, you can however get a speedup by setting the "VU Cycle stealing" speedhack slider to 2/moderate. Vice City Stories may get a speedup from that too but if it doesn't I think the only way to get a sure speedup with it is going in the "inis\pcsx2_vm.ini" file and setting the "FramerateNTSC=59.94" or "FrameratePAL=50.0" lines to 30 or so instead but only do it for that game as others work better with the default setting.
thanks! the speedhack for shadow worked really well. Who knew exploring vast emptiness was such fun?
edit:changes to the framerateNTSC and PAl vars don't seem to affect the value displayed in the GS window and indeed it stays at 50 for PAL 60 for NTSC. so couldn'T fix that for vcs