hq2x/lq2x filters cause audio problems

Irrenmann said:

My GeForce FX 5950 Overclocked should be able to handle this, right? So what is going on with the sound?

Click to expand...

It's a bit more complicated than that, hq filters are limited by a combination of the graphics card (performance varies with GeForce/ATi, and speed of card), AGP Bus, CPU among others, so your system may be limited in any one of these (probably the AGP which you can't do much about.) The sound problems are certainly caused by your PC not getting 100% speed, causing lag which is most noticable with the sound.

My system cannot handle hq2x at certain resolutions either with 0 frameskip, so I turn on a frameskip of 1, which fixes all the problems. So, change the frameskip until the game is smooth enough, or use another less hardware intensive filter.

If you have trouble with hq2x, just use AdvanceMAME 2x, it looks almost as good and runs a LOT smoother. My mom/brother's PC uses this since it doesn't like the hq2x in a window size larger than 1x.

I wouldn't worry about this particular filter not running too well, it really is a very stressing filter, mainly to the comparitive complexity of the filter compared to the other less complex (and much faster) filters. The filter benefits from AGP 8x, and my card with 8x AGP could out-perform faster cards (like Ti4200s) that were on AGP 4x, so it definitely is a factor. It will run badly on pretty much any system, PCI-Express will no doubt help a great deal here.

There was a big thread about this on ZSNES board before it was hacked where MaxSt (author of the filter) posted an AGP executable to benchmark the various hq filters in an attempt to get data to improve the speed of the filter (in the end MaxSt said that he really couldn't do much more to speed it up).

I still have that benchmark so I'll attach it so you can test your system out. I believe the command line options are /2 (for hq2x) /3 (for hq3x) and it defaults to hq4x. There are others which I've forgotten..

For me, I get from the output:

HQ mode : HQ4X
Buffer : 1024 x 896 x 16bit
----------------------------
Blitter : AGP
Top speed = 927 fps (1622 Mb/s)
----------------------------

You can use this result to guage the performance of your PC with the filters. If it's much more then some of your other settings are perhaps slowing it.

Other than the 1 frameskip (don't use automatic frameskip, it's too slow and choppy on fast systems), I use the Direct3D render engine (I find it faster) with Kode54's 1.7.2 CVS build of VBA.

My system handles hq2x decently enough. AMD 2500+, 512MB PC2700, ATi 9600 Pro (using 8x AGP mode)

HQ mode : HQ4X
Buffer : 1024 x 896 x 16bit
----------------------------
Blitter : AGP
Top speed = 1000 fps (1750 Mb/s)
----------------------------


W00t. :happy:

I only get around 1500MB/s but that suits me just fine.

HQ mode : HQ4X
Buffer : 1024 x 896 x 16bit
----------------------------
Blitter : AGP
Top speed = 571 fps (999 Mb/s)
----------------------------

OMG , i really need a Mobo which supports AGP 8x ( ok , i can turn it on , but it crashes all the time when i do so )

Which graphics card would that be?

Also, that utility may not reflect what happens in say, ZSNES, try that with a high resolution and HQ4X and see how well it runs, Tales of Phantasia is a great test as it has very fast moving pictures. *will post screenie later on*

Here's a shot of a very quickly and ever-changing picture running on HQ4X, I resized the pic to be more download friendly so its from 1280x1024 to 640x480.

While a game is running in ZSNES hit the F1 key and select "Show FPS" and hit enter, you'll get your framerate on the screen.

I get just slightly more than what Cooliscool gets with the AGP test utility though.

I like to run VBA with hq2x filter. But when hq2x filter is enable, some games run a little bit slow, such as F-ZERO.

So I download the source code of VBA 1.72, and do some minor modifications.

(1) I add some dynamic frame control mechanism in IDisplay::render() function. After doing that, the render function of display class always try to keep 45 FPS, no matter which frequency emulator core to call the IDisplay::render().

(2) Second I use ICC 8.1 to optimize VBA.

The result I get is about 15% faster than official optimzed VBA 1.72 version. I have attached two pictures running F-Zero with 3x window size, hq2x filter, 0 frame skip, no throttle.

I also upload the compiled VBA, I hope it may help.

I think dynamic skip frame is a not bad idea, but nobody interested. So let me explain a little bit the reason why I add frame control in display class since VBA already have frame skip mechanism. And any comments and corrections is more than welcome.

(1) VBA frame skip mechanism is fixed in skipping order. For example if you choosing skip 1 frame, then VBA always drop second frame. In some games, for example F-Zero, this cause the track don't show up.

(2) No matter how big the CPU loading of GBA core is, VBA frame skip mechanism drop the same amount of frames. In title screen the cpu core may be free, but in middle of game the CPU may be busy. Always skip the same amount of frames don't make sense to me.

(3) Frame skip automatic didn't take the display rendering overhead into account. If you run a game usin large window size (x3 for example), and use high cpu demand filter (hq2x for example), the image process take about 10 - 20 ms in my computer. So I think it's more make sense to determine how long to sleep after display rendering not before.