Is Pj64 fast enough?

[Ballard]

I'm way more concerned with accuracy than speed, at least since I have a bunch of N64 games and my machine was water-damaged a few years back.

I'm pretty happy with how the games perform on the currect PJ64, but I notice some bugginess here and there that I don't remember on the original hardware.

I've never explored the source to PJ64 and I'm not really sure how the operations are performed, whether this thing cycles the opcodes in the order of the APU/GPU cycle the CPU would do; one at a time (a la BSNES or MAME), or if it executes the cycle with the opcodes simultaneously. I'm assuming the latter since I'm sure that a cycle-accurate N64 emulator would take a MONSTER PC to perform 60/60, if the current paradigm could do it. The BSNES emulator requires at least 2.2 GHz to run 60/60, nothing less.

I'm sure the tech-heads here A. Already know this and B. are aware that a cycle-accurate PJ64 would piss off the majority of people who use the thing 'cause it would be dog slow, plus I'm sure you'd have to have separate BIOS files for the games and the emu, instead of a hacked universal one.

Maybe I'll just have to plunk down 40 bucks on another console.

I also suggest a way to disable RTDSC timing. I don't know if it's used in the timing model of PJ64, but I get the same sounds skipping that happens to MAME when RTDSC is on.

 

[NuVanDibe]

I haven't really had a speed problem with any games except things like Goldeneye, which require a very high-end pc to run them. I've got a 1.4 ghz processor.

 

[SuperMario64]

Speed is good.
I'd rather see stability improvements and graphics bugs corrections

Same here.
I think the "machines" today are fast enough to run the emu with no speed probs.
I love pj64 its almost perfect.

 

[jahra!n]

Games like Perfect Dark could use some speed optimizations, especially when its using those special screen buffer effects like the night vision and also the real time refraction with the cloaking devices.

Also if the source is ever planned to be released, the speed should be highly optimized as much as or even more than 1964 just for ports to other devices like game consoles. I did hear of someone working on one for the PSP but it runs extremely slow and only runs 1 game. Having a hand held N64 that runs as great as the real thing would be as nice as a orgy with 5 college cheerleaders.

 

[SuperMario64]

jahra!n wrote:

Having a hand held N64 that runs as great as the real thing would be as nice as a orgy with 5 college cheerleaders.

lol :bouncy:

 

[ManiacPC]

Works pretty fine for me... But with Pc's with IGP it's hard to make PJ64 work fast sometimes...(Talking about those ranges 1.000 - 2.000 mhz)
With a nice a new pc it works perfect.
With older video cards (64 - 32 mb) it work slow on some games sometimes...

For example: When i was playing with a 550 Mhz, 128 Mb, Ati radeon 7000 32mb it was better to use 1964 not for compatibility... PJ64 works with games great... It just won't fit the speed to the machine

There are other ways to make dynarec faster?
What about the method (Pretty Buggy and beta yet) used for example in Gcube? Isn't fast?

 

[Cönker1]

The speed is great, but (obviously) deteriorates when I use high resolution textures, yet the emulators says 50FPS (pal game) it still feels slower.

 

[Smiff]

The speed is great, but (obviously) deteriorates when I use high resolution textures, yet the emulators says 50FPS (pal game) it still feels slower.

unless you're a member with 1.7beta.. (we don't have any high res texture support in 1.6).. so that's not PJ64, sorry, so it's off topic.

 

[Cönker1]

unless you're a member with 1.7beta.. (we don't have any high res texture support in 1.6).. so that's not PJ64, sorry, so it's off topic.

Yes I get that.

But normally when playing the only speed problems are ones like LoZ start menu. Slight slowdown in Conkers Bad Fur day, I mean slight (i was on 4xAA and 16xFSAA)

 

[shark_midget]

I'm on a dell 2350 with 128 mb of ram and a 2ghz processor. . .most games play perfectly. . .the only games that don't are the ones that you'd probably expect. . .goldeneye, perfect dark, conker only slows down in the matrix parody part. . .and sadly the only game I really want to play is perfect dark. . .but it's too slow. . .I gotta have the skies too. . .I just wonder why the skies in area 51 and the datadyne levels are there lol. . .probably because they're made differently. . .oh yeah. .the graphics is an integrated 32 mb piece of crap. . .

 

[huacara]

Actually......

Nvm about my last post, it had nothing to do with this thread, well peeps guess what pj does have some speed isues if u want to run the game perfectly, dunno like when u wanna watch the zelda menu rite u have to put the orkling sampling that slows pj, or when u wanna see the shots on pkmn snap u have to turn on copy to sdram crap wich also slows down a lot, i dont have a godly pc but i dont have a bad one either so i think it rly needs some speed upgrade ^^, o yeah, im running pj on pentium 4 3.0 ghz, nvidia geforce 6200 pci express turbo cache 128 vmb

 

[huacara]

o yeah

n 512 ram <------even if u flame me for that i was planning to upgrade it anyway

 

[Smiff]

interesting, more people are asking for framebuffer speedups (which is more a video plugin issue as we have it) than a faster core..

 

[Clements]

I noticed big differences in the performance hit of framebuffer and similar effects. Perfect Dark is a good example, as it uses many of these.

Nightvision and the Camspy have fairly negligible speed hit on my systems, but the Slayer (Fly-by-wire Rocket) has a much bigger speed hit (but is still usable).

A lot of the framebuffer effects in other games still do not work (Bomberman 64 intro, Sin and Punishment motion blur) but it improved massively with the 1.6 plugin (many motion blur and framebuffer-type effects emulated in Perfect Dark, Majora's Mask etc)

 

[Poobah]

I'm stuck with a damned Intel processor, so PJ64 is quite slow for me. However, I still feel that the developers' time should be spent on something else, because I'm the one at fault for having an Intel processor even though AMD ones are better and cheaper.

 

[gandalf]

it´s not developers fault that Intel decided to cut the L2 cache to 128kb in the celeron line (not celeron D)
Netburst needs a lot of cache to works fine, your Celeron have so few cache....the performance hit is big


I saw a long time ago, why the emulators can´t emulate all N64 frame buffers.

Why?

 

[Poobah]

it´s not developers fault that Intel decided to cut the L2 cache to 128kb in the celeron line (not celeron D)
Netburst needs a lot of cache to works fine, your Celeron have so few cache....the performance hit is big

What are you talking about? I never implied that the PJ64 developers were at fault because of Intel's Celeron processor. I almost said the opposite: that the PJ64's speed is fine, so their time should be spent on other aspects of PJ64.

 

[Smiff]

it´s not developers fault that Intel decided to cut the L2 cache to 128kb in the celeron line (not celeron D)
Netburst needs a lot of cache to works fine, your Celeron have so few cache....the performance hit is big


I saw a long time ago, why the emulators can´t emulate all N64 frame buffers.

Why?

the N64 has one block of memory. if the N64 cpu wants to do something to it, like use it as a texture - that's easy, because it doesnt have to be moved anywhere (which is lucky, cos the n64 latency is shit). because the n64 was so limited in most ways, game devs took advanctage of this a lot for prettiness' sake. a pc, is completely different: it has lots of RAM, and seperate RAM and VRAM. copying from VRAM to RAM (which is the only place a game running in PJ64 can do stuff on it) is still shite slow, despite AGP/PCIe etc because it has to take the bus.
so most of this stuff (in HLE) has to implemented with lots and lots of Cunning Hacks.
there is my casual explanation, the end

 

[reebboy]

I just started to use P64 and have only tried a few games with it. With a Celeron 633 under windows ME and the standard onboard grapics and audio card, I am able to get the games to run slightly over half speed (30-35 FPS) with choppy sound, and a fairly low res setting. If I cut the sound out I can Up the speed to about 40-45 FPS. (with sound off) this is pretty good and very playable. I was amazed that with such a low end system I was able to get any game to run decently. If I want sound I just crank up my stereo while I'm playing.

 

[n00by duddy]

speed is not an issue. Crashes are.

quoted for truth
even games signaled as slow run fairly well in any modern cpu. you can't really be blamed by those who have a 5 yo system (5yo = VERY OLD for a PC)