Slow Downs in Soul Reaver

[Elvin Presler]

I am trying to play Soul Reaver NTSC-US. In a nutshell, it looks great, sounds great but drops into roughly 60% slo-mo speed any time I come up on anything using any "lighting" effects(?) The little portal things you change realms on, camp fires, blood effects when you kill something, any open space, etc. When it slows, of course, my controls lag too and I can't control Raziel.

I've tried every GPU and SPU plugin I could find. All the usuals + several older versions. Tried all the stuff in the sticky threads, AMD Dual Core "Optimizer", Windows XP and Vista, ePSXe 1.70 and 1.60, several toggles in the Nvidia driver control panel.

Hopefully there is something simple I have just missed? I swear I played this game a bit on my old Athlon 2700 with ePSXe 1.5x or something and it was fine. Something the newer computers/video card/drivers have that I can shut off or something?

Edit: If I disable the frame rate lock (F4) it runs at like 4x speed in the same spots as the slow down...so it's not a matter of under powered hardware. Why would the frame limiter reduce it to slo-mo when the hardware is capable of 300% + speed? Also I noticed I can not use the GPU's frame limit now as an alternative...the built in one just keeps turning itself back on every restart, and disabling it with F4, also disables the GPU's.

Thanks

Windows Vista 64 and/or XP Pro 32 (usually XP, I hate Vista/7)
AMD X2 7850 (runs at stock 2.81GHz)
4 Gigs Ram (dual channel stock timing 4,4,4,12)
Nvidia GTS 250 1 gig ram

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Last edited by Elvin Presler; October 16th, 2009 at 18:00..

[jonc2006]

do you have any other games that you could use to see if this is a reoccuring issue or if it is just limited to soul reaver? can you also post a shot of your video config?

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[Elvin Presler]

I tried Tomb Raider 1, 2, and 3, and Silent Hill. All work fine.

Here's a screenshot of it and the text. This would be the first area it starts slowing, near these "glowy souls". It's really sluggish everywhere though, unless nothing is going on and the camera is basically aimed at a wall. It is "SLUS_007.08" if that matters.

I've also added srpsx.zip, a 19 sec., 2.78 meg. video of it. Watch his movement slow as I approach the area, and speed up as the camera points to the wall near the end. Fraps recording caused zero slowdown, showing I have plenty of horsepower to spare. Frame rate is solid at 30 FPS, then slows to 20-22 FPS (Fraps) in the bad spots, rendering the controls basically useless for combat. It was even hard to jump up the steps at the beginning. The slow down starts right as I jump.

Plugin: P.E.Op.S. OpenGL Driver 1.1.78
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce GTS 250/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!
OGL version: 3.0.0

Resolution/Color:
- 1280x960 Fullscreen - Desktop changing [32 Bit]
- V-Sync: on 
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off

Textures:
- R8G8A8A8
- Filtering: 5 - edge clamping supported
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- Palettized tex windows: off
- VRam size: 1024 MBytes - 196 textures usable

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on *Note: it says on, but is not checked in the setup. Odd?*
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 2
- Framebuffer texture: 2 - texture created
- Framebuffer access: 0
- Alpha multipass: on 
- Mask bit: off
- Advanced blending: on  (hardware)
- Subtractive blending: activated

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- 15 bit FB: off
- Dithering: off
- Screen smoothing: off
- Game fixes: off [00000000]

Attached Images

	config.jpg (102.5 KB, 3 views)
	PSOGL001.jpg (41.3 KB, 11 views)

Attached Files

srpsx.zip (2.74 MB, 5 views)

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Last edited by Elvin Presler; October 16th, 2009 at 23:36..

[Hooker Jay]

Had the same problem myself that I couldn't fix and while moving the flaming torches to burn the wooden beams on the way to the first boss, it made my entire system go into an unrecoverable sleep mode where I had to mash RESET on the case. My rig consists of ...

GeForce 6600GT AGP
Abit NF7-S 2.0
AthlonXP 3200,
1GB RAM, WinXP Pro SP3.

I was using epsxe 1.7 and Pete's OGL Plugin with shaders effects. Other games ran smoothly, so I suspected it was the 162.18 nVidia drivers and I didn't bother updating them because between the 97.21 drivers and the 162.18 drivers, nVidia broke alot of things such as the VIVO jack (which I use for my Dreamcast, PS2, and my digital camera) and the worst case of banding/tearing I've ever witnessed in my PC games such as FEAR and LOK: Defiance. So updating them wasn't an option ... but playing Soul Reaver with nullDC certainly was! Other than stuttering/crackling sound during the FMVs, it ran solid all the way through.

[Squall-Leonhart]

You need to install the Dual core optimiser (its required on XP for any AMD multicore chip)

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Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

[Elvin Presler]

I did that after reading the stickies and it made no change, but thanks.

[Squall-Leonhart]

who was talking to you?
i don't reply to thread hijackers.

__________________

VBA-M | Xtemu | NGOHQ | Post Impact Productions | TNHW | XBCD 0.2.6 | Satanic666's Emulator Compiles
Don't be a NOOB, READ THE NGEmu/EmuForums Rules of Conduct
Need Help with ePSXe? This is your first stop!.
If you don't post all the required information, you don't get help.
Everytime someone posts a romsite, God kills a beautiful woman.

[Elvin Presler]

Originally Posted by Squall-Leonhart

who was talking to you?
i don't reply to thread hijackers.

Thought you were talking to me...I started the thread. Duh?

And just FYI, the dual core "optimizer" has never fixed any problem I have heard of and in some cases, from first hand experience, causes severe system instability. IE: random and frequent Windows crash/bsod/rebooting, even total failure to boot (last version of it on XP Pro).

[Hooker Jay]

Couldn't be talking to me, Squall -- my 6+ year old rig is about ...

{*looks at spare parts in corner*}

.... about one good quality 24-pin 500+ watt power supply short of being a single core AMD system ... ... and about seven or eight pleading arguments to weedle a friend down on a spare multicore AMD processor he thinks his 11 year old daughter really needs!!