Can't run the first town in Last Story at full speed even at 4.5ghz i7

drhycodan · 08-18-2013, 11:05 AM #1

Is it possible to get full speed anymore on the first town with the latest build? Even at insane clock speeds, it will drop to 80% speed in open areas of the town. It seems EFB to RAM slows the game down a lot. I'm just curious to know if any can run the first town in open areas with full speed with the latest SVN build. If so, what clock speed and processor?

**ExtremeDude2** · 08-18-2013, 11:14 AM #2

Last story is very demanding, you need a haswell at like 4.5+ to get full speed (if your lucky XD)

**AnyOldName3** · (This post was last modified: 08-18-2013, 11:16 AM by AnyOldName3.)

That's a Sandy Bridge E chip, so in single threaded IPC is about on par with Ivy Bridge, and is a bit worse than Haswell. The current recommendation is a 4670K or 4770K @ 4.2-4.3 GHz, which should be about the same as yours, but this is a limit of how far they'll overclock, not what is good enough.

Bear in mind that TLS doesn't even run at its intended framerate on the Wii sometimes, so you shouldn't expect perfect gameplay all the time.

**ExtremeDude2** · (This post was last modified: 08-18-2013, 11:26 AM by ExtremeDude2.)

(08-18-2013, 11:15 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: That's a Sandy Bridge E chip, so in single threaded IPC is about on par with Ivy Bridge,

I believe it is slightly less than Ivy Bridge

**NaturalViolence** · 08-18-2013, 11:32 AM #5

In dolphin it might actually be slightly more. Regardless AON3 is right. It should be roughly the same.

***Shonumi*** · (This post was last modified: 08-18-2013, 01:28 PM by Shonumi.)

(08-18-2013, 11:15 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: Bear in mind that TLS doesn't even run at its intended framerate on the Wii sometimes, so you shouldn't expect perfect gameplay all the time.

It only drops the FPS on the Wii though. The CPU and DSP on real hardware are still running at 100% (the music, for example, runs perfectly even when the FPS goes south). They probably didn't want to tank the whole game when it slowed down, I guess. The slowdown in Dolphin (80% as mentioned by the OP) affects emulated CPU and DSP performance however. It may be possible to emulate the Wii's slowdowns (FPS go down, but gamespeed is 100%) but I haven't seen anyone confirm this in Dolphin yet. Just a neat difference I thought I'd bring up. But yes, no hardware, Nintendo or otherwise, currently runs this game without slowdowns. Such is life.

I think the issue is EFB->RAM. With TLS, that's a killer combo, a whole new level of "demanding", especially in Lazulis City. Looking at the wiki you can probably switch back and forth as needed between EFB->RAM and EFB->Texture with hotkeys. I've not played this game in Dolphin, so I can't attest to that. It may help with the speed if you can pull it off.

drhycodan · 08-18-2013, 04:45 PM #7

What about turning off idle skipping? I heard somewhere that idle skipping just doesn't limit the Broadway and Hollywood's clock frequencies, so as to not have the slowdowns a real wii does I'm guessing.

**NaturalViolence** · 08-18-2013, 04:48 PM #8

All idle skipping does is skip nop (no op) instructions. It shouldn't effect that.

***Shonumi*** · (This post was last modified: 08-18-2013, 04:52 PM by Shonumi.)

(08-18-2013, 04:45 PM)drhycodan Wrote: What about turning off idle skipping? I heard somewhere that idle skipping just doesn't limit the Broadway and Hollywood's clock frequencies, so as to not have the slowdowns a real wii does I'm guessing.

Try it. It'll take you all of two seconds to see if it works for you or not :p

Although disabling Idle Skipping would be making emulation more accurate, so I don't know why you'd think it'd allow Dolphin to avoid behavior exhibited by real hardware (especially since enabling Idle Skipping is usually supposed to speed up emulation, not the other way around). However, messing around with Idle Skipping and the old VBeam Speed Hack has been shown in several games to cause interesting speed and performance results.