Lag and slow down during certain sections in game with ZSNES

[ZeReLioN]

Hi there.

At first, ZSNES ran totally fine with no issues a month ago. Lately, I've been experiencing significant and irrefutable lag or slow downs during certain sections of games. They almost always seem to be during moments of high effects or activity on screen, but not always. Sometimes a single laser being shot can cause the game to slow down or lag even if I am not doing anything and standing still. These games include A Link to the Past or Mega Man X games for eg. Certain games still seem to be fine such as the Donkey Kong Country trilogy games. The thing is when I put up the fps counter in game, it shows a constant 60 fps no matter what.

I have tried many things in the settings. I have experimented with different resolutions with R or S, without any filters, full screen and windowed. Tried with both vsync and triple buffering on or off and with either on. I have tried putting it on very low resolution with no HQ filter and makes no difference. Auto frame rate and the amount of frame skip also make no difference. I am very easily able to recreate/replay these issues since they happen at the exact same spot/sequence or action every single time no matter the settings.

My PC specs are

i5-4670 3.40GHz
8.00GB Ram
GTX 760 2GB

I have the latest windows and drivers and runtimes.

At first I tried to simply ignore it and figured it was part of the emulation but it seems to happen fairly regularly now and it is really breaking timing, speed and immersion.

Is there anything out there I haven't tried yet or anyone have any idea what might be my particular problem here?

Thanks for the help.

[grinvader]

They almost always seem to be during moments of high effects or activity on screen, but not always. Sometimes a single laser being shot can cause the game to slow down or lag even if I am not doing anything and standing still.
(...)
The thing is when I put up the fps counter in game, it shows a constant 60 fps no matter what.

This last point is indicative of in-game lag.
The SNES wasn't exactly the fastest beast in the bunch, and cpu-heavy games cause lag, from barely noticeable single frames here and there, to massive slowdowns that aren't really fun to trudge through (third stage of Gradius 3 is a good example of that).
You can tweak the cpu execution% a bit, but many games don't work correctly when that goes too high.

It's not-exactly-but-almost how it happened on the real thing. ZSNES isn't perfect when it comes to timing, which can cause some extra lag (and remove some), all in all there's not much you can do about it.
You can even try better fine-tuned snes emulators, but they will also present this behaviour (aside from previously mentioned timing issues, that is).

[Gil_Hamilton]

And in general, ZSNES has LESS slowdown than a real Super Nintendo.

So it's a part of the authentic experience, and you should be mad it doesn't happen more often.

[ZeReLioN]

Nice of you guys to reply.

I did figure it was simply the emulator emulating the original system/game optimisation but it does happen in somewhat peculiar areas (no clear or logical reason why it was lagging) and in such popular games where I've heard people mention no issues whatsoever with these games.

What I'm experiencing is similar to a massive drop in fps to like 10 fps for a few seconds or when the action on screen is occurring. All the while I am maintaining a solid 60 fps with no drops whatsoever (tried both the emulator fps reading and Fraps). It comes and goes with the particular event/action but happens every single time the action occurs. For eg an enemy fires a particular projectile and the game would lag to extremely low fps but as soon as the projectile dissipates everything is fine, only to repeat again with the next projectile. My CPU usage is also lowish at most.

Are these instances really the case for such popular games like Link to the Past, Mega Man X and the regular Mega Man series? Anyone have experience with those games and experienced similar occurrences? It does seem to happen very rarely in the DKC games. I haven't tried Mario games extensively yet (Could be happening in them too).

Thanks for the extended support.

[blackmyst]

I've always found a good measure of this to be Super Mario World. When you unlock the first switch palace (the yellow one) you get a little scene where it sprays a whole bunch of the yellow blocks from the top of the mountain. On a properly working SNES, this should run absolutely smooth. On some recent versions of Zsnes, it lags a bit.

[Gil_Hamilton]

I did figure it was simply the emulator emulating the original system/game optimisation but it does happen in somewhat peculiar areas (no clear or logical reason why it was lagging) and in such popular games where I've heard people mention no issues whatsoever with these games.

Slowdown often isn't mentioned in the context of Super Nintendo games unless it's REALLY bad. Some slowdown is simply expected of the platform.

What I'm experiencing is similar to a massive drop in fps to like 10 fps for a few seconds or when the action on screen is occurring.

Sounds like slowdown.

All the while I am maintaining a solid 60 fps with no drops whatsoever (tried both the emulator fps reading and Fraps).

Sounds like slowdown.

It comes and goes with the particular event/action but happens every single time the action occurs. For eg an enemy fires a particular projectile and the game would lag to extremely low fps but as soon as the projectile dissipates everything is fine, only to repeat again with the next projectile.

Sounds like slowdown.

Are these instances really the case for such popular games like Link to the Past, Mega Man X and the regular Mega Man series? Anyone have experience with those games and experienced similar occurrences?

I can't speak to Megaman 7, but I've played Megaman X to death and it has a LOT of intermittent slowdown.
And yes, there is a weapon or two that's pretty much capable of single-handedly causing slowdown on real hardware.


Legend of Zelda actually demonstrates the opposite issue very early on. The spinning Triforces in the initial power-on title sequence rotate far too fast in ZSNES and their rotation animation consequently finishes well before it ought to(they should collide at the same time the rotation stops).



Anyways, ZSNES is not an exact gauge of where you will see slowdown on a real system for various reasons, but it DOES happen on real hardware, fairly frequently, and in some rather high-profile titles.

[grinvader]

Real hardware example.