Final Fantasy 8 or 9 in ePSXe

[ready2rumbel]

I'm using ePSXe 1.5.0 in XP, with 'Pete's OpenGL 1.58' plugin, 'Pete's DSound Audio Driver 1.14'. I'm trying to play Final Fantasy 8 and 9, but every time I enter a fight, when the screen 'shifts' (showing the cool effect before actually fighting), it starts chopping and jurks unti it passes and I can start fighting. Has anyone encountered this problem before? Cause i'm desperatelly trying to fix this. Are there settings or plugins which I need to use? I'd really appreciate all the help I can get. Thanks to all of you in advance.

Mike

[Betamax]

The "swirls" require a LOT of horsepower to display correctly. It's probably just the case that your machine can't hack it sorry. You'd be best to switch em off.

[Exophase]

Chances are it's because of the heavy CD loading then. Make ISO's or just live with it. A couple small drops in fps probably won't kill you.

- Exo

[RhombusYSS]

Even with my pretty powerful system, I had huge problems with battle swirls in Chrono Cross. I would stay steady at 60 fps at all other times, but then the swirls would dorp me down as slow as 2 fps.

What I did to "solve" it was turn off my card's FSAA and make sure the screen smoothing option was off too. I hear the swirl problem has something to do with not optimal compatibility with pete's ogl 1.58 and win xp detonator drivers - because other graphics intensive screen transitions not swirl-related run absolutely fine on my system.

It's mostly because the swirls involve huge framebuffer reads and THEN you apply FSAA and smoothing on top of it, which will drag the best system down kicking and screaming

Other graphics intensive thingies probably involve hardware supported stuff if they go fast

Mortu

[RhombusYSS]

It's strange, cause I use neither of the frambuffer read fixes in the "specific game fixes" and neither do I use full vram primitives (I tried using them, but they didn't really affect my performance) yet I don't lose anything, no special effects or anything. Granted I have GFX card buffer for FB textures.

So have I, but my gfx card buffer isn't that fast and with swirls and fsaa and smoothing it takes a big hit in performance

Mortu

i think it's the fsaa in xp. i only use screen smoothing now for games. it works better than fsaa anyways. with both of them activated(sm and fsaa) i feel like looking at something 2d which is not what i want(excessively blurred edge doesnt always make the games look better in 3d hehe).

[Zeke_D]

Time for my $0.02...

Swirls and other battle transition effects have always plagued 3d GPUs. Most people just decide to not worry about it. Others who really want to see the BTE switch to a soft GPU. On the lighter side, I had the oppurtunity to play ff8 on a moster system, and still had problems with the BTE. Here were those specs in case you cared:

Ilanium 2.8Ghz Processor
1.5GB DDR ram
2.0GB sandisk CF hard drive (AwSoMe!)
some 128MB DDR GeForce card
some kind of high-end phillips sound card.

[rajatjain35]

Originally posted by Zeke_D
Time for my $0.02...
Ilanium 2.8Ghz Processor
1.5GB DDR ram
2.0GB sandisk CF hard drive (AwSoMe!)
some 128MB DDR GeForce card
some kind of high-end phillips sound card.

You know, zeke_D, a 2GB hard drive isn't really that AwSoMe, anymore. I am guessing that you meant 200GB or something,:rofl:. Although i am salivating at the rest of the system

[ready2rumbel]

I don't Know what the heck I did, but I got ePSXe running like i've never seen it before! Final Fantasy 8 and 9 fly when the 'swirls' occur. It has improved every game I play, like for example, Smackdown! 2 ran like....well, real slow, but now it's running really nice. I installed new drivers for my ATI Radeon 64MB VIVO, played around with some settings in my BIOS, and set some tweaks for Windows....wow, i'm really happy. Thanks...all of you, for your help.

Mike

[fivefeet8]

The swirls in all the FF games and CC always ran full speed with no slowdown what so ever for me.. Even with 4xFSAA enabled.. Ah.. The power of lewpys glide pluggin and a voodoo 5 5500 agp..

[ready2rumbel]

Well, 'fivefeet8', considering you're using a Voodoo 5:5500 AGP, with a Glide Plugin, which is much faster than any OpenGL/Direct3D plugin, i'm not surprised that the games you play, especially FF8/FF9 run bloody fantastic. But, I think I've got my system and ePSXe running really nice!

My Specs
-------------
AMD Athlon Xp 1600+ (@1400Mhz)
384 MB DDR RAM
20GB Fujitsu Hardisk
ATi Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO
Sound Blaster Live! Value

[Goku7]

Here comes another one of my "Wild Shot's in the Dark" for a solution.

Are you using any "frame skipping" settings? I know that, at least in lewpy's plugin, using frame skipping will absolutely chop up the swirl effects. The same thing is probably occuring with pete's OpenGL or D3D plugins.

Oh, and for the record, I don't think horsepower is a problem in Ready2Rumbel's system. I'm using a considerably slower card than his (mine's a V3 2000 PCI), and I don't have a slowdown when using "Gfx Card Buffer". However, I prefer to use lewpy's plugin, as it's rendition of the swirl effect in FF9 can only be described as "Amazing!".

[Zeke_D]

Actually a compact flash 2 GB drive IS aWsOmE. Considering there are no moving parts, no spinning disk no noise and an amazing seek time.

yes hehe that hdd is faster than hell and is used basically for servers only for high bandwidth data transfers for important documents. bloody fast and awesome as hell. it's not always the size that determines how good a hard drive is, most of the time it's the specs. having a 100 gig 5400 rpm udma33 drive for instance is for pure storage and is really not very awesome at all =).

[ready2rumbel]

Replying to you, 'Goku7', I'm not using frame skipping, cause I don't need to, but I am using FPS Limit, with the 'Automatic Frame Limiter' on. Should I take that off?

Mike

[Goku7]

By all means, leave it on. With a 1.4Ghz system, and a 64meg Vid card, chances are they'll play TOO fast with the frame limiter off. I have a 1.5Ghz P4, and I've had a couple of experiences where I accidentally had the Frame limiter off. It's both scary and funny at the same time.

For FF9 (NTSC, at least), the game is ok with a 59FPS cap for normal in-game 3d and 2d; and, the movies seem to be made for 50FPS.

I don't know about FF8 (I use the PC version for that :P), but I think it's pretty safe to assume it'll work with the FPS settings FF9 likes.

[gpw11]

I've been tinkering with FFIX alot lately. I've got the video and sound working perfectly, and I get smooth battle transitions. Here's my settings:

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.58
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce2 MX/PCI/SSE

Resolution/Color:
- 1024x768 Fullscreen - Desktop changing [16 Bit]
- Keep psx aspect ratio: on

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 5
- Garbage collection: on
- VRam size: 0 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: on
- FPS limit: 60

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
- Screen smoothing: off
- Full vram: off
- Game fixes: on [00000200]

most ppls who get slow downs when entering battle with nvidia cards have fsaa turned on. once that's off it tends to not matter too much.