Lots of slow downs in all roms

Zenoth · Post by **Zenoth** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 5:56 am

Hey guys,

I'm experiencing regular slow downs in pretty much all of the roms I'm used to play, the performance drastically drops to a slide show (most of the time) as soon as there's "too many" sprites or just too many things going on at once, is that to be expected due to emulation? My system is quite beefy for the task: Intel C2D 8400, 4GB DDR2 800, NVIDIA GTX285 1GB, Windows XP SP3 32-Bit.

Maybe it's often slowing down due to the settings? Are there any known recommended "fast" settings? I'm currently using 1280x960 resolution with the DS F filters. It looks very good and the screen is properly stretched. I already tried to reduce the resolution but the slow downs are still there. Any recommended options not to use perhaps? Some help in increasing performance if at all possible would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 6:00 am

Try this. Start up ZSNES, then go into the Task Manager. Next go to processes, then right click ZSNES and select "Set Affinity..." Uncheck CPU 1 and see if that helps.

Zenoth · Post by **Zenoth** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 6:55 am

I.S.T. wrote:Try this. Start up ZSNES, then go into the Task Manager. Next go to processes, then right click ZSNES and select "Set Affinity..." Uncheck CPU 1 and see if that helps.

Thanks.

I tried it and it does help a little bit, but the slow downs are still there. I can give you one example, I often play Mega Man X, and right when the game starts you need to make your way to the first sub-boss (the soldier controlling a mechanized armor dropping from a ship).

Well during the course of that introduction you run on some roads which are crackling and falling as you walk on them and you need to jump off of those falling road "blocks". When those blocks crackle there's "smoke" effects, well, if I run on two or three of those blocks fast enough and they start crackling at the same time and fall together then the performance will literally go from 100+ FPS to around 10 FPS, it doesn't last long (as long as the effects are on-screen), but it's annoying.

I suspect that there's some in-ZSNES options that I might have chosen/modified from the default values that may be causing those issues, or maybe it's a common issue amongst emulated games whatever the emulated plaftorm is and I'm just not aware of it (I'm relatively new to emulated games). So your trick does help some, I've noticed some improvements in Mario Kart and Super Metroid, but generally speaking it's not fixed completely.

franpa · Post by **franpa** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:00 am

check your computer BIOS and make sure to disable all power saving features?

Zenoth · Post by **Zenoth** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:48 am

franpa wrote:check your computer BIOS and make sure to disable all power saving features?

My system is working properly outside of emulation, and the power saving features are turned off indeed. I'm playing a little bit around with the options but so far no luck.

franpa · Post by **franpa** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:07 am

NVIDIA's geforce 200 and Vista offer a hybrid power mode, can you try disabling that feature in Vista's power options?

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 11:06 am

That only comes into effect if he has an nVidia GeForce motherboard, and I don't believe any of the GeForce Intel motherboards had that feature.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:13 pm

franpa wrote:NVIDIA's geforce 200 and Vista offer a hybrid power mode, can you try disabling that feature in Vista's power options?

He's using XP SP3. NOT Vista.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:16 pm

Processor throttling shouldn't be a problem with Core 2 Duo, as it always returns a constant rate for the RDTSC instruction. And even then, ZSNES uses the QueryPerformanceCounter function to regulate its speed, which doesn't use RDTSC in Core 2 Duo systems, or other newer Intel processors. So, it can't be the power settings.

Squall_Leonhart · Post by **Squall_Leonhart** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 9:25 pm

yeah,.... i don't know how many times i've heard that, and then the problem was still with speedstepping...

paulguy · Post by **paulguy** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 11:27 pm

Do you have 2 or 4 cores? If you have 4 you'll have to deselect 3 of them in the Set Affinity box.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 1:24 am

I have a similar processor (Core 2 Duo E8500) and no such speed problems, even with speed stepping turned on. Of course, I don't have the same motherboard, or video card, and I'm running Windows Vista 64-bit.

(PS. lol @ 4GB of memory with 32-bit OS.)

Zenoth · Post by **Zenoth** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 2:51 am

kode54 wrote:I have a similar processor (Core 2 Duo E8500) and no such speed problems, even with speed stepping turned on. Of course, I don't have the same motherboard, or video card, and I'm running Windows Vista 64-bit.

(PS. lol @ 4GB of memory with 32-bit OS.)

Fast on reaction are we?

I'm using a dual-boot with XP SP3 x86 and Vista Home Premium x64, and my emulation programs and games are on my XP SP3 partition amongst other programs which do not work properly under a 64-Bit operating system (mainly old games, some of which are installed with a 16-Bit installer, which is simply not supported anymore under 64-Bit).

I didn't mention that I have Vista x64 simply because what concerns this thread is the slow performance I often get in ZSNES which is on my XP partition. My 4GB of RAM is fully used in Vista x64 if that will make you sleep better tonight to know about it. With that said now I have tried to adjust some options since my last post, but I haven't been able to put my finger on the responsible cause(s) of the performance issues I have.

As for my motherboard it's a Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6, and none of my hardware components are over-clocked, every single parts is running under completely default frequencies, and as I mentioned none of my other games have any issues whatsoever, my system is perfectly functional, it's only isolated to most of my ZSNES roms. I'm also playing GENS+ games and some Project64 games, but none of those have any slowdowns, it's really just happening with ZSNES. I will give a try to another SNES emulator to see if perhaps the roms themselves could be corrupted maybe and that ZSNES itself has nothing to do with it.

What is the "next best thing" when it comes to SNES emulation?

I.S.T. · Post by **I.S.T.** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 2:57 am

bsnes is great, so is snes9x.

I've heard SNESGT is good, but I've never really used it.