effects of background running programs on pcsx2

[cmkannan]

what are the possible problems one using pcsx2 can experience
when there are backgroung processes like anti virus,internet ,etc
also will disabling them affect the speed of emulation in any way?

[echosierra]

Running less background processes frees up processor time for pcsx2. May be a significant bump, you may notice no difference at all. Depends on what applications and your system specs.

I can run Visual Studio in the background with no ill effects, but it isn't exactly processor-intensive when it's just sitting idle. Any sort of media player will probably be noticeable, same thing with a web browser.

[Fadingz]

If your GPU is your bottleneck, then you won't notice any difference

If your CPU is your bottleneck, then you will.

[skoreanime]

Some anti virus programs don't allow PCSX2 to even run at all. And running a virus scan takes up quite a bit of CPU power and also hard drive read speed. That'll definitely hit hard if you're running off an ISO.

[cottonvibes]

you can easily take b4 and after comparisons with the AV running and w/o it running...

obviously the less background programs, the better PCSX2 is going to run....

[RPGW1ZaRD]

Depends on which applications of course is ran. Some have 0% cpu usage and won't slow down at all. I'm using ESET NOD32 antivirus and this software uses 0% CPU all the time so you don't notice it's there except when doing a manual scan or it's updating virus definitions.

[Mr. Killjoy]

And if you have a quad-core, you wont notice any difference in fps, pcsx2 only uses 2 cores and Windows autobalances load. It means there are chances that your AV and other programs are assigned to cores the emu isn't using. Though as said above, if you're playing off an ISO and doing massive disk access with AV, defrag or others, you may notice slight freezes each time the game tries to load new data.

[Core0]

I have no idea why but some time ago, on Vista, in the VM build, I kept getting constant BSODs while I had Steam loaded.

[Squall-Leonhart]

Originally Posted by RPGW1ZaRD

Depends on which applications of course is ran. Some have 0% cpu usage and won't slow down at all. I'm using ESET NOD32 antivirus and this software uses 0% CPU all the time so you don't notice it's there except when doing a manual scan or it's updating virus definitions.

and even more dependancy is placed on how deeply tied the AV is to the OS.... some have files that are loaded via the shell.

[Coolsvilleman]

Originally Posted by Mr. Killjoy

And if you have a quad-core, you wont notice any difference in fps, pcsx2 only uses 2 cores and Windows autobalances load. It means there are chances that your AV and other programs are assigned to cores the emu isn't using. Though as said above, if you're playing off an ISO and doing massive disk access with AV, defrag or others, you may notice slight freezes each time the game tries to load new data.

exactly what i was going to say. just another reason to go quad.

[echosierra]

Originally Posted by Coolsvilleman

exactly what i was going to say. just another reason to go quad.

The problem usually isn't raw CPU power, since program idling in the background should be using little to no processing time. The big problem with AV/firewall/music programs is the disk access when they are doing any type of scanning or reading.

Hard disk access is incredibly slow. The average access time of the Raptor drive I have is 3 milliseconds. A 3.0 Ghz processor executes 9,000,000 instructions in that time. If the emulator has to wait on an AV program because both want to access the disk, you're definitely going to notice.


That isn't to say that quad-core is bad in any way, just that this issue shouldn't be a deal-breaker. If you're running into problems of this sort, maybe you shouldn't run so many programs when you want to emulate something

[n30]

I had WindowBlinds running & it cut my fps in half..
The choice was simple..Bye Bye windowblinds..