Slow Magic in FFVIII. (Answer only if your CPU is lower than 1,5GHz)

[Titus03]

Do you have slowdowns with FFVIII, specially with magic-spells?
Slow spells are: water, holy, demi sometimes and the one what Ultimecia uses in final-battle?

If FFVIII is running good with your PC (<1,5GHz) with HW-plugins, could you tell your GPU-plugin-settings, please?

[Kane]

My machine is 1.4GHz, and you can see the configs on my site. I don't recall any slowdowns in the magic....

[Kingo]

Use that configs, really works I already try them,
and my PC is 1.2ghz
But, whats your video card, and Ram?

[Dark Watcher]

Pent III 733MHz...slow enough for ya
check our profile for our build....no problems with FF8 spells

[Titus03]

Kingo, my video card is Geforce3 with 64Mb.
Can you also tell are you using PAL or NTSC?

Lord Kane, thanks, I'll take a look, when I go back to my home.

[Kane]

I alos hoave a geForce 3 and my configs were made from the PAL version.

[Titus03]

I tested your settings, but spells were still too slow. Water was 25-42FPS anh holy even slower.
Is there anything more settings I have to improve?
For example Detonator-settings?

[F-3582]

I played it with these settings without any slowdowns:

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.74
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce2 GTS/AGP/3DNOW!
Resolution/Color:
- 1024x768 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing [32 Bit]
- Keep psx aspect ratio: on
Textures:
- B8G8R8A8
- Filtering: 6
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- VRam size: 64 MBytes
Framerate:
- FPS limitation: off
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto
Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 2
- Framebuffer texture: 2
- Framebuffer access: 0
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: on
- Advanced blending: on
Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- 15 bit FB: off
- Dithering: off
- Screen smoothing: off
- Screen cushion: off
- Game fixes: on [00000002]

Edit: Enabling "Old Frameskiping Method" might also help.

[Snooba_Wookie]

Yeah...I know what you are talking about. I too get slowdowns on those magics...but its not your CPU (I have a 1.4) its the graphic plugin.

Magics work fine if you use the OpenGL plugin. If you use the D3D (like I do) you will get slowdowns like those.

I mailed Pete to tell him about the problem, but I can't get a reply from him...

[Titus03]

Snooba_Wookie, maybe Pete doesn't care about FF8.

Are you using special settings in RivaTuner, etc.?
It's as slow with OGL than D3D.

[Snooba_Wookie]

Well, if he doesn't care about FF8, he should at least reply the mails you send him....I hate people like that....but anyway.

No...no special setting on RivaTuner nor in the OGL plugin itself, just the usual stuff. Just in case...here is my ogl config. (1.74)

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.1.74
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce FX 5200/AGP/3DNOW!

Resolution/Color:
- 640x480 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing [16 Bit]
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off

Textures:
- R8G8B8A8
- Filtering: 2
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- VRam size: 128 MBytes

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

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 3
- Framebuffer texture: 2
- Framebuffer access: 0
- Alpha multipass: on
- Mask bit: on
- Advanced blending: on

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Line mode: off
- Unfiltered FB: off
- 15 bit FB: off
- Dithering: on
- Screen smoothing: off
- Screen cushion: off
- Game fixes: on [00009002]

[Kingo]

Hey if Pete´s plug-ins come whit fixes for ff games
how come he don´t care,
try using Pete OGL 2, and enable the special game fixes on the plug-in, it should work.

[Andrew Hruska]

darn, another non-3dfx user

Anyways, using lewpy's glide i get 80fps ( no limit, NTSC ) at 800x600 4xAA with those spells. And that's a slowdown

OGL2 will probably run like s*i* on a Geforce 3 ( if it even runs )

[F-3582]

Kingo, Pete's OGL2 plugin was intended to be used on fast computers. With High-End GFX cards. I don't think that it would speed up emulation.

[Titus03]

F-3582, surprisingly with OGL2-plugins I got a bit better speed than with OGL-plugins, but difference is minimal. Sometimes OGL2-plugins are slower, that's true.

Thanks, Snooba_Wookie, with your settings, only "water" spell is faster, but others are still slow. I still prefer 32bit. Thanks anyway.

Kingo, Pete said in his document-file, that he didn't care if scanline-effect appeared in HW-plugins again. He has fixed many games, but Square-games are the most buggy with Pete's plugins. Let's see, when he fixes battle-swirl in FF8 in OpenGL2-plugins...

[F-3582]

Battle Swirls = PEOpS Soft plugin

[cowboyayanami]

Oh ,I occured your problem. My computer is Duron 750 with 128MB SDRAM and Geforce2 MX400. When I spell the Big wave the screen will slow down. Is it helpful for you?

[Titus03]

cowboyayanami, do you mean Leviathan? It works fine on my PC. Water is slow with my PC. You may also mean that Ultimecia's spell, that's very slow.

F3582, or OpenGL-plugins with FVP.

Do you have any other ideas? Thanks for all.

[F-3582]

I said that, because PEOpS Soft plugin displays them much faster (and more exactly) than OpenGL-plugins with FVP.

[Raziel]

Make sure you're playing from an ISO, as using spells in FF8 involves loading from the cd, which almost always slows down the game, with an ISO, it won't. Oh and, make sure you're using a low framebuffer access setting, like "emulated vram" it's enough for FF8, as for frame buffer textures, use "gfx card framebuffer", also, make sure you're running without FSAA, as it will only make your games slower.