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Chrono Cross slowdown

4K views 12 replies 8 participants last post by  Squall-Leonh@rt 
#1 ·
Regardless of settings I use, sometimes i get major slowdown.Only happens in this game.

It happens on S.S invincible ship, Masamume(when it stops your from entering Dead Sea I think)

Now I got to the part that i need to save Kid, and u get transported in past in Lucca house.It is really slow and I could barely see anything.

Now I set my settings to Pete 2.9 and it is barely playable, i can see stuff now it is not black but it runs slow.

any help?
 
#6 ·
So, I know this is a bit of an old thread and all, but I have these same issues and have some thoughts on the matter, and felt it was better to add to this discussion than to start a whole new thread.

Near as I can tell with this particular issue, it's got nothing to do with lack of power, or improper settings. What I've discovered is that it appears to have something to do with a buffer or cache not flushing itself or something of that nature following battle. My evidence for this is the only times these slowdowns occur are when there is a high amount of framebuffer effects going on outside of battle, ie on the SS Invincible with the background going all blurry and same with the conversation with the Prophet of Time in the manor library. To support this theory, during these moments of heavy slowdown, if you bring up the IGM for Pete's GPU (pressing del) and key over to the framebuffer effects (FE) selection and simply toggle it in any direction (tested from 3 to 2, 3 to 0, 2 to 3, 2 to 1), everything snaps back up to full framerate and works flawlessly until the next time you enter battle. For instance, starting the game from a fresh load on the overworld and then going straight to the Invincible, no framerate issues occur, even if I leave the Invincible and re-enter it many times, or visit other locations that don't involve battle. However, the moment you get into a battle and then return to the Invincible, BAM, the slowdown returns. It is still corrected by doing the above method, and remains that way until the next time you do battle, which strengthens my suspicions about it being some buffer or cache that isn't getting emptied following battle, until you forcibly clear it by toggling the FE level.

Soo, those are my thoughts on the matter, I sadly have no solutions to offer, as while I am fairly savvy with this sort of thing, I'm not quite -that- savvy. My hope with all this was that by throwing out these ideas someone with a bit more know-how than I have might be able identify the root cause, and come up with a better solution. If not, well I have at least come up with a partial solution to the issue for anyone else that might be experiencing it. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing, I say!
 
#7 ·
Settings for CC should be one of the following depending on which pluggin you are using.
Chrono Cross (U) [CD1: SLUS-01041] [CD2: SLUS-01080] - ePSXe v.1.9.0
PSX Mode: 320x216=Gameplay, 512x432=In-Game Menu, 640x432=New Game-Continue Screen
Pete's OGL2 Off-Screen drawing: [0: None]
Pete's OGL2 Framebuffer effects: [1: Minimum] Enables battle transition effect.
Pete's OGL2 Framebuffer upload: [0: Minimum]
Pete's GPUs Off-Screen drawing: [1: Minimum]
Pete's GPUs Framebuffer textures: [0: Emulated vram] OR [3: Gfx card buffer & software]
Pete's GPUs Framebuffer access: [4: Full software drawing (FVP)] Fix enter battle effect.
Recommended GPU: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver No bugs that I notice!
Recommended Texture filtering: [0: None] [2: Extended] Looks OK. Glitched menu boarders.
Rumble: Works!
Pete's GPUs Special game fixes: [Remove big polygons]
All GPUs Special game fixes: [Odd/even bit hack] Fixes "Status" hang on in-game menu
option. (ePSXe v.1.6.0 and lower)
Command Line: -noauto Fixes game speed in ePSXe v.1.6.0
Do not use the SPU Core sound pluggin for this game...it causes lag and slowdown in certain areas and scenes.
Instead go with the Eternal SPU pluggin.
I am currently playing CC with the 2.9 recommended settings and having 0 issues.
 
#8 ·
Actually, I had tried using varying combinations of SPU plugins, Eternal's included, and while I admittedly did not encounter the above noted issue using other sound plugins, I instead noted a far more bothersome issue: occasional sound corruption due to what appears to be reverb, and skipping during screen transitions. Given that these issues are far more frequent than the one I described above, with no resolution or way around them that I have discovered, I've stuck to the core SPU and have been refreshing the FE level whenever I have this slowdown.

What drove me to posting regarding this was the fact that it does, and can, function perfectly, 100% fine depending on the situation, which leads me to believe that it is a programming bug of some kind, especially since it is reproducible. I hoped that in detailing the bug properly, with specific details and evidence, it might merit enough attention to being corrected in a future build. I'm aware that hope is largely unrealistic, but one can never know without trying, and as I also mentioned, for other folks like myself who find themselves in my situation, it provides a reasonable work-around.
 
#10 ·
In my testing with this issue, I had only tried the OGL2 plugin, as I made assumptions that since it had a 2, that meant it just had to be better. Yes, I know, flawed logic, and, as ironic as it is to state, you know what they say about assumptions LOL. I tried OGL1 just now, and while I'm at a point where I can only use the Bend of Time to reliably test this issue, which is such a short effect animation that it's sort of hard to see the issue happen, it would appear that OGL1 doesn't not have this issue. So, that got me to thinking and more testing, as one difference between the 1 and 2 plugins is the lack of the 'widescreen fix' option, which I had been making use of in the 2 plugin because, again making assumptions, I thought I would have need of the fix. Well, after disabling the widescreen fix in the 2 plugin and instead using the 'scale to screen, but keep aspect ratio' option, I also no longer see the issue in OGL2. Again, I only have the short bit of entering the Bend of Time to test with at the moment, but I will be making sure to test further when I get to another point where I can test it at length. I guess with all the resolution changing going on in this game, it makes sense that forcing the wrong resolutions on it might have been the source of all this. Although, in the end, looks like I'll be sticking to OGL1 because I had noticed the OGL2 plugin was hit-or-miss with properly displaying the current grid level of elements while in battle. I know, it's a tiny thing, but thus far OGL1 has displayed it 100% properly, blinking and all, and I don't see anything else that it isn't doing right... So, maybe that's the best GPU plugin to use for this game, after all.

Anyway, thanks to the both of you for taking time to read my posts and respond to them, as I clearly wasn't being as thorough and objective with this issue as I thought I was!
 
#11 ·
That's why it's interesting to test plenty of them plugins. =P

The main difference between OGL and OGL2 is the newer (by then) OpenGL 2.0. That's why it allows fancy shaders. My guess was that Pete's plugin might share the same texture cache method so it could happen in his other HW plugins as well, if the culprit is the texcache that is.
 
#12 ·
Having slowdowns regardless of settings then use other emulators such as ssspsx and pcsx reloaded that can use the same plugins and may offer better results...

In my experience epsxe handles real psx slowdowns incorrectly where it slows down everything and not just the graphics, I just used ssspsx and the issue was solved
 
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