PJ64 going slow in my new rig, WTF?

[SeymourOmnis]

Can it be because of the integrated graphics? My specs:

AMD Athlon 3500+
512MB RAM
VIA Chrome 9 IGP 64MB

When it goes to high relotuions(1024x768), it gets slow, but on 640x480, it can reach up to 100FPS on goldeneye.

It's very strange, since the card supports SM2.0.



How can I fix this? thanks in advance.

[Clements]

Jabo's plugins were really only developed and optimised with ATi/NVIDIA in mind. VIA IGP solutions are simply not meant for 3D gaming - they are more suited to business use, so 1024x768 would probably be enough to cause major slowdowns.

At lower resolutions, their is less workload on the graphics card, so your CPU makes up for it. Although it supports SM2.0, this is not an indicator of 3D performance. You could update drivers to try to squeeze the most out of it, but even a graphics card like a GeForce 6200 would enable you to play games at 1280x1024 with some AA enabled.

[SeymourOmnis]

so, the solution is to buy a dedicated graphics card? I always thought that PJ64 was based mostly on the CPU..

[Clements]

It is, but you are an edge case since you have integrated VIA graphics that is incapable of high resolution gaming with a strong CPU, and so you have a video card bottleneck.

When you have good enough graphics hardware to output the relatively simple N64 graphics at a particular resolution or quality setting, the CPU does almost all the work emulating the system. If I upgraded my graphics card to a 8800GTX, the increase in frame rate would be negligible to zero, whereas CPU would provide a proportional increase that could be seen by disabling the speed limiter.

[SeymourOmnis]

Ok, thanks for your helpful responses

I'll buy a dedicated graphics card now, but, I have fouund a very weird issue!

Normally, my old P4 3.2ghz laptop (which is broken now) with a Radeon 9000IGP, it could handle almost any game at 1280x800, but when I enabled copy framebuffer to rdram, the game slowed down to hell, to 30FPS.

Now, with the VIA option, games are slow on high resolutions, but I can enable copy framebuffer to rdram with no problem at all! It sure subtracts alot of FPS, but I can play MK64 on 800x600 at 80FPS! Incredible!

What could be the cause of this? Maybe the hyper transport technology, which the intel lacks of?

[Clements]

IGP solutions eliminate a bottleneck where there is no need to copy framebuffer over the AGP/PCI-E bus.

Also, the ability of different manufacturers hardware (like NVIDIA, ATi, S3/VIA, Intel etc.) to do framebuffer copies is often very different, some are much faster or slower than others. Generally, PC games do not do framebuffer like the PSX and N64 did, so it tends to be slow when emulated on PC.

The add-in card would still give a net benefit despite the IGPs framebuffer advantage.

[TioRuben]

i have lag problems too , on castlevania 1 and 2 , pokemon stadium games, fighting force and some others , i have procesor: p4 1.6ghz ,512 ram, and a ati radeon 9250 256 mb , help me! :@

[squall_leonhart]

start your own thread

no thread hijacking!