FFIX battle transition slowdown -- Help

[cooter]

Whenever I go into a battle, I get a tremendous slowdown. It shows a swirly colored transition effect combined with music going at about the pace of a snail. After waiting for maybe 20 seconds or so, the music speeds up, and the cdrom resumes loading whatever data is needed for the battle...

My question is, is this normal, and is there anything I can do to remedy this?

Here's my settings. My system is an AMD athlon 1700+ and a GF3-Ti200. I'm also using Pete's Dsound Audio Driver 1.14 and ePSXe CDR ASPI core 1.4.0. for the cdrom plugin and the 7502 bios file. All this is under WinXP

Thanks for any assistance you guys might be able to provide


Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.56
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce3/AGP/3DNOW!

Resolution/Color:
- 640x480 Fullscreen - Desktop changing [32 Bit]
- Keep psx aspect ratio: on

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 6
- Caching: 3

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 3
- Framebuffer texture: 2
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: on
- Advanced blending: on

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- Dithering: on
- Full vram: off
- Game fixes: on [00000200]

[StarkRaven]

This slow-down can be fixed by changing your video settings. In the setup for Pete's OpenGl plugin, under "Compatability," you need to change "Framebuffer Textures" Set it to #1 "Black." This will disable the transition screen all together, but you will lose some magic special effects too.

I had the same problem when I played this game a long time ago, on my geforce2mx. The key is the "framebuffer texture" setting in your graphic plug in. A geforce should be able to do those transition screens in hardware, which would go really fast, but every now and then it stops working. I played with the 'Black' setting for about half the game. Then one day I tried 'GFX Card Buffer' again and it wored with no slowdown. Maybe its the driver version, or just random! Anyway just play with the 'Black' setting for now.

[cooter]

That worked well, thanks a bunch.

I also found that messing around with the anti-aliasing settings in the geforce properties had an impact on speed as well. Strange though, the game seems to run at full speed in everything but the transition effects. I think I'll leave my anti-aliasing on full, and just deal with the missing transition effects. The characters look 10x better without all the jaggies

--coot

[StarkRaven]

Glad to help. And why pay for a Geforce3 if you aren't gonna crank the AntiAliasing all the way up! Good luck.

[liquid]

and the moral of today's story is....
if you want fast Framebuffer effects, don't turn on FSAA.

[kingking 3rd]

don't use gfxcard framebuffer. turn on fvp and use emulated vram. it is going to run at 60fps with 4xfsaa and you can have all framebuffer effects

[Ranma Kawaii]

Huh... For me it work fine, FF9 does the green swirly thing w/o any big slowdown, the music just slow-down for 2 seconds or so.

Well, whatever...

[cooter]

I dunno dude. I tried both the Black and emulated vram framebuffer methods, and they both work at full speed, whereas the graphics card method just chugs and chugs :confused:

Anyways, thanks for your help guys

--coot

[jsjaedon]

yeah, i'm having the same problem,

when the battle commences, and the screen does the swirly thing, it goes like 1 frame every 10 seconds. Is there any way to fix this without losing visuals? (ie switching framebuffer texture to #1 black?) I know switching to black will bypass the problem, but then you just get a black screen, and someone mentioned you lose magic effects...

I tried using the VRAM option, and it seems to look the same as the black option. It mentions you need FVP. Could someone tell me what that stands for?

here's my settings

1ghz AMD Duron
256 PC100
Kryo I 4000XT 32mb graphic card

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.56
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: Imagination Technologies
GFX card: PowerVR KYRO

Resolution/Color:
- 800x600 Window mode
- Keep psx aspect ratio: on

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 6
- Caching: 2

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: 70

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 3
- Framebuffer texture: 0
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: off
- Advanced blending: on

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- Dithering: on
- Full vram: off
- Game fixes: on [00000200]

[Kane]

Full vRAM primatives. Not worthwhile, as it is just as slow on my 1600+

[zero0w]

The framebuffer texture (set to gfx card) worked fine with GeForce display card with detonater newer than 12.xx. It is EXTREMELY (10s/frame maybe slower) slow on my TNT2 card though (didn't try out det 12.xx with that however). For the time being you have to try and see which works better. It may require sacrificing some effects for better 3D polygon model perhaps.

[Tiddles the Cat]

I had the very same problem with the transition swirl slowing down dramatically, but everything else running fine, with a Geforce 2 MX 400, FSAA turned off.

In the end I solved the problem by changing down to a 16-bit colour depth. The transition and all other effects then worked nicely at full speed.

Dunno if that helps anyone else.

[StarkRaven]

Setting Frame Buffers to GFX Card SHOULD in a perfect world be the correct setting. With a geforce this option should give you full visual effects and speed. However it often doesn't work like that. Like i said before, I've had the slow battle screen problem come and go on my setup, which was a geforce2mx. This makes me suspect it is a driver problem. Try using the latests driver, it can't hurt. When I get home I'll give you guys a readout of the settings that worked for me. I have a feeling that it might have something to do with the Texture Caching setting too. I hade mine set to the gfx card setting or something.

[fivefeet8]

If your going to play with 4xFSAA and want to see the swirly effects then turn your resolution down a notch or two.. I can get full speed swirly effects at a resolution of 640x480 with 4xfSAA enabled.. Of course I use lewpys glide pluggin so no wonder it's fast on my voodoo 5.. From my experience with petes gpu pluggins, on v5's it's faster to set framebuffer textures to emulated Vram and enabling FVP.. Setting framebuffer to hardware is slow on v5's.. Of course lewpys glide pluggin can do the swirls full speed though, so I don't use petes gpu pluggins.. I just speed tested them against lewpys glide pluggin..

You might also wanna consider playing from an iso..

[Kane]

Then again, the V5 still has the best anti-aliasing avaliable

[StarkRaven]

These settings let me play with full speed battle transitions on my geforce2mx with AA turned on. I've upgraded to a g2GTS recently so that changed

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.56
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: BoomBoom/emulated by GeForce2 GTS/AGP/3DNOW!

Resolution/Color:
- 800x600 Fullscreen - Desktop changing [32 Bit]
- Keep psx aspect ratio: on

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 6 (actually this setting got reset recently, i don't know whats best for ff9)
- Caching: 3

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 4 (again i'm not sure if this is the right setting for ff9)
- Framebuffer texture: 2
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: on
- Advanced blending: on

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- Dithering: off
- Full vram: off

[Kane]

Thinking about it, that might be why my machine is slightly sluggish.
Paletised textures may cause slight graphical glitches, but it uses a hell of a lot less memory.

6 is the right setting for final fantasy 9 filtering.