pcsx2 Zombeaver's PCSX2 Configs / Simple 1-Click Installs With PCSX2 Configurator

[kmoney]

Wow...I didn't realize how much my graphics card was holding me back trying to achieve some of the config settings until I upgraded my graphics today. Most of the configs gave me no problem but a few like the Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance games really struggled with the config unless I moved the IR to 2x, which I am not satisfied with unless I can at least get the resolution up to 3x without any problems.

I had a GTX 760 with 2GB Ram which is not terrible but just not enough paired with a 4690K CPU and upgraded to a GTX 1060 with 6GB Ram with the same CPU and wow what a difference with just PCSX2 alone. I always knew my CPU was enough but my graphics card was holding me back for sure. Now the games I was struggling with like the Dark Alliance games run like butter without stutter or frame drops at a high IR.

[alec100_94]

@kmoney That's interesting, I imagine the bottleneck would mostly have been the 2GB of Ram. I have a (now rather dated) GTX 770 4GB model and don't really have too many problems running any of the PS2 stuff. I can also usually still manage to pretty much max out new and demanding titles (Like Hitman), and get an extremely smooth 30FPS. I think about upgrading sometimes, but truthfully my current GPU meets all of my gaming and emulation needs.

[kmoney]

33 minutes ago, alec100_94 said:

@kmoney That's interesting, I imagine the bottleneck would mostly have been the 2GB of Ram. I have a (now rather dated) GTX 770 4GB model and don't really have too many problems running any of the PS2 stuff. I can also usually still manage to pretty much max out new and demanding titles (Like Hitman), and get an extremely smooth 30FPS. I think about upgrading sometimes, but truthfully my current GPU meets all of my gaming and emulation needs.

I agree,I think the bottleneck had a lot to do with the 2GB of ram. I am happy because now I can turn up Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance to 4x IR and turn Blending Accuracy up a notch and still get solid performance. Time for a playthrough

[mssngr]

On 15-11-2017 at 1:56 AM, Zombeaver said:

So I've been messing around with this one for a while now... this game's pretttttty rough. I don't know that I'd call it unplayable, but it's pretty damn rough, no matter what settings I use. It just seems to be a massively system-intensive. During gameplay, it seems to be mostly okay but it fluctuates. Cutscenes have severe intermittent slowdown depending on what's going on though. I tried pretty much everything I could think of but nothing really improved it much.

Below is what I ended up with, but I will not be uploading these to github and I'll be removing the game from my library because it's just not in a sufficiently playable state for

No hacks, gamefixes, or alterations to EE/IOP, VUs, or GS. I tried different changes to EE Cycle Rate but it didn't really change anything. Changing the audio sync rate to async will make the audio play normally but the video (in cutscenes at least) lags so much and so frequently that the audio becomes completely out of sync almost immediately. Async is useful for games that have very brief, sporadic dips in performance, but bad when you're consistently getting bad performance. D3D9 is the least taxing hardware renderer, but it didn't help much. Software wasn't any better. Sorry dude, I tried 
 

So I have been searching this game (the getaway) looking people who got it running in the past and actually found a decent configuration. The cutscenes are not a 100% stable but  watchable and the gameplay is good. To bad it is not possible to exceed the native resolution. But I am actually pretty happy with this result. Your thoughts?

[Zombeaver]

I can try it out and see. You have to be real careful with VU Cycle Stealing though, that has the tendency of breaking a lot of stuff. EE Cycle rate can too but somewhat less frequently, and I did try altering it when I was testing (not VU Cycle Stealing though). Generally I recommend staying away from both most of the time.

[Zombeaver]

I've added new configs for the below titles. Details are on the sheet. I've started on Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix but I'm not happy with it. That game has some issues.

Crimson Tears
The King of Fighters 2006
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System
Soul Reaver 2
SSX Tricky
SSX 3
The Warriors

[alec100_94]

So I had a shot at the Getaway (Not tried with the sequel yet), and was able to achieve a pretty nice result at ~1800p, that runs pretty much flawlessly (Though not sure quite how it would fare on a much weaker CPU).  My Settings are below, Both the Full CRC Hack Level and The High Blending Unit Accuracy are required to make the it display properly (without glitches), and there are some effects missing (in terms of shadows), but it's not a huge deal as it still looks natural.

Also @mssngr was right about the VU Cycle stealing needing to be at one to make the cut-scenes run at anything close to full speed (Though I didn't need to change the Emotion Engine). And to get 60FPS (in cut-scenes) I also needed the MTVU Flag (otherwise it would hover around 48-53, And FPS is clearly tied to timings/Physics here), Though pairing back the resolution might fix this. The game itself seems to run pretty stably at a solid 60FPS for me with no drops. Another thing that looks really nice is this game (and helps clean it up a bit) is an FXAA Shader Pass, Though a guess that is a little personal preference. I would be curious to know what specs your computer is @mssngr.

 

Another cool but unrelated tip, if you enable the multitaps in PCSX2 under config, you can then connect up to 8 virtual memory cards at once, which should make copying saves around from within PCSX2 easier.

Edited November 17, 2017 by alec100_94

[mssngr]

13 hours ago, alec100_94 said:

So I had a shot at the Getaway (Not tried with the sequel yet), and was able to achieve a pretty nice result at ~1800p, that runs pretty much flawlessly (Though not sure quite how it would fare on a much weaker CPU).  My Settings are below, Both the Full CRC Hack Level and The High Blending Unit Accuracy are required to make the it display properly (without glitches), and there are some effects missing (in terms of shadows), but it's not a huge deal as it still looks natural.

Also @mssngr was right about the VU Cycle stealing needing to be at one to make the cut-scenes run at anything close to full speed (Though I didn't need to change the Emotion Engine). And to get 60FPS (in cut-scenes) I also needed the MTVU Flag (otherwise it would hover around 48-53, And FPS is clearly tied to timings/Physics here), Though pairing back the resolution might fix this. The game itself seems to run pretty stably at a solid 60FPS for me with no drops. Another thing that looks really nice is this game (and helps clean it up a bit) is an FXAA Shader Pass, Though a guess that is a little personal preference. I would be curious to know what specs your computer is @mssngr.

 

Another cool but unrelated tip, if you enable the multitaps in PCSX2 under config, you can then connect up to 8 virtual memory cards at once, which should make copying saves around from within PCSX2 easier.

@alec100_94My specs are i7 6700HQ, GTX 970m, 16 RAM.

With this configuration I get a some square shades behind a character. Also one of the character's hand  has some weird movement and sometimes disappears completely. The same character also sometimes disappears completely during the cut scene. The gameplay is very solid tough.

 

Nice tip about the multitaps!

 

@Zombeaver Thanks for the configs!

[alec100_94]

@mssngr I was getting the same issue, but turning up the CRC Hack Level, and Blending Unit Accuracy pretty much fixed it for me, now there are no or un-natural shadows, involuntary hand movements, or dissapearing characters (at least not in the opening cut-scene). Maybe putting it up a little higher may fix it for you.

[mssngr]

I put CRC to Aggressive and Blending to Full (ultra is to slow) but I still get weird shades and hand movement.

[alec100_94]

Ok, After some more testing I did observe a few issues with that setup (Though they weren't entirely consistent). Enabling the Frame-Buffer Conversion Hack, seems to mostly stabilize it (with only minimal shimmering), though I did notice there were some problems when I tried to record it (Though framerate was pretty much the same, and GPU usage well below 90%), so maybe try disabling ShadowPlay for PCSX2 as I think that automatically records in the background.

[mssngr]

@alec100_94 I cannot get it to run without some big glitches in the cut scenes, gameplay wise it is perfect but this game is very much dependant on the story so I guess i will go for quantity over quality and switch back software rendering.

And by the way I never use Shadowplay, I only turned it on so I could send you a recording of my screen. But I will be using screentogif for that now .

The only reason I have geforce experience installed is to use an app called moonlight, very usefull for streaming games to other devices.

Thanks for helping me out on this one, I learned a lot about the internal settings from you and @Zombeaver, which will definitely help me set up other games.

Edited November 17, 2017 by mssngr

[alec100_94]

@mssngr It is actually really inconsistent for me. Sometimes it works flawlessly other times something breaks with exactly the same settings.

[mssngr]

48 minutes ago, alec100_94 said:

@mssngr It is actually really inconsistent for me. Sometimes it works flawlessly other times something breaks with exactly the same settings.

That is the feeling I have too, even with software rendering I saw a weird hand movement, but only once. And I did have a near flawless one with your settings, but also only once or twice. Strange.

[alec100_94]

I have been testing a bit more, and have had a run of mostly consistent (and non-broken) run through's with tweaked settings (around 5 the same with the same settings). One Thing I have noticed is that there is sometimes a messed up hand animation specifically on the young boy in the green shirt, Though this doesn't always happen and is mostly out of view without the screen settings set to 16:9. Here is where I am currently at, though I still want to do a little more testing.

 

[alec100_94]

After a little more testing I see the basic problem, as @Zombeaver suggested the problem with the animation and inconsistencies is clearly caused by VU Cycle Stealing (as putting it up further makes it worse), and all we can do with modifying settings is putting a band-aid on the problem. Without it though the cut-scenes run at a terrible frame-rate which makes it very unpleasant as the audio is either stretched (slowed down) or runs at the correct speed with the video being significantly behind.

This says that the game relies on a very strict timing system and that if the framerate is not 60FPS things will run slower, this is in general a bad way of implementing timing in games and timing should generally be based on what the framerate actually is, and not what the developer expects it to be, which is why modern games don't have such problems. The end result would be some what choppier but at least everything would be in sync (as opposed to smooth but slower). I don't know if it would be possible to rework it through some hack so that the timings of the animation were based on the actual framerate, but currently this is what we are stuck with.

[Zombeaver]

I'm not surprised. As I said, VU Cycle Stealing is highly problematic in most cases. I adjust EE Cycle Rate as a last resort but never touch VU Cycle Stealing as it just creates a ton of problems. You'll see an issue report and then a note of "Not an issue - don't adjust VU Cycle Stealing" allllllllll over the wiki, and it's generally recommended on their forums that you just never touch it.

[mssngr]

Ok this made me chuckle because I am now having real success with all your last settings and VU Stealing to max 3. The cut scene is near flawless, so is the chase scene with the car. Only problem I have now is a big square shadow when exiting the car. But the gameplay is normal. In advanced settings and hacks setting, checking the disable depth emulation almost makes the square shadow disappear, but also creates a random artefact in the background every now and then, so i turned it off.

Edited November 18, 2017 by mssngr

[alec100_94]

I have pretty much found a setting that works, although it's not perfect and won't always maintain a full 60FPS during cut-scenes (But is pretty close). If you keep the settings above, but disable HW Hacks, then return the VU Cycle stealing back to zero, and what really made it speed up is reducing the EE Cyclerate to -3 (All the way down), and it doesn't seem to have had an impact on the gameplay either. A small problem here is that the Audio will be slightly stretched during some cut-scenes but not by much as it maintains ~50-60 FPS, so the stretching is barely noticeably. If you were prepared to take a hit on in-game performance, then maybe the PAL version of the game would work better as that should have a target framerate of 50 instead of 60 due to the regional difference in TV refresh rates at the time.

@mssngr, I'm not saying the VU Cycle Stealing should be avoided at all cost, just that it is likely to cause unwanted/expected behaviour and/or artefacts and problems, that we are essentially just covering up with hacks.

Edited November 18, 2017 by alec100_94

[mssngr]

I am already using the pal version. Your last configuration is absolutely playable and watchable, although I am having the same shadow issues as I mentioned I am having with the riskier VU +3 setting I was using.

So at the moment the shadows in both configs for me are big and square, but the cutscenes and gameplay is near flawless with VU +3.

This makes the game absolutely playable for me. I will start with the riskier profile (VU +3) and if I encounter game breaking issues I can go back to VU 0, EE-3.

And maybe there is a way to get rid of the goofy shadow.

Again I really appreciate the time you are putting in this to help me out.

@Zombeaver I hope you are ok with us discussing this game here?