Beetle PSX - PlayStation1 CPU Overclocking! (Patreon)

Published:

2018-02-09 01:57:13

Imported:

2023-08

Content

To continue on from yesterday's story, Super Nintendo CPU overclocking has now been added to all Snes9x libretro ports. Snes9x 2002, 2005, 2010, and mainline all support this new great feature. The only difference is that with 2002 and 2005, it requires a restart, whereas from 2010 onwards it works on-the-fly.

Now, onto the big new unveiling today - CPU overclocking for PlayStation1! Simias has added CPU overclocking now to the Beetle/Mednafen PSX emulator.

You should be able to get access to the latest Beetle PSX core by going to Core Updater and updating your Beetle PSX core (both HW and non-HW).

Important to note:

* Beetle PSX previously had an option called 'CPU Overclocking' which was actually erroneously named. A more appropriate name for it would have been GTE Overclocking, or even GTE stall removal. The existing CPU Overclock option will be renamed as 'GTE Overclocking' in light of this.

* Be aware that this all can tend to be rather CPU intensive right now. Beetle PSX is still using only a CPU interpreter core after all. If we want much better performance later on, Beetle PSX will require the use of a dynamic recompiler in order to get big performance gains.

Finally, some tips -

* Try out various combinations of GTE Overclock and CPU Overclock. Be aware that enabling both of these options stresses out your CPU the most, and that in some cases it can pay off to disable GTE Overclock but set CPU Overclock a lot higher. In case you have GTE Overclock on at the same time, you can often achieve similar results to CPU Overclock with GTE Overclock turned off by just setting CPU Overclock to a lower figure.

Other hints -

* Some games require you to set CPU Overclock to 250% in order to attain a locked 60fps. Some games have a builtin framerate limiter and do not allow you to increase the framerate this way.

We have found the following:

- FF8's battle scenes are locked to 15fps, but the field areas are not and can be made to run at 60fps.

- Crash Bandicoot 1 can be made to run at 60fps or 41-ish fps. Be aware that I was not able on my Core i7 7700k right now to get Crash 1 to run at fullspeed at a locked 60fps. We might indeed require a dynamic recompiler here before this becomes practical for most people.

- Soul Blade/Edge seems to max out at 41-ish fps. I don't think going even higher than 500fps would bear much fruit.

- Silent Hill 1 has certain scenes that can be made to run at 60fps, but others will still drop down to a lower figure no matter how high you set CPU Overclock. It is possible a combination of cheat codes and CPU Overclock will be required here in order to get this running at a locked 60fps, just like how it is done on PCSX1. We invite the community to experiment with this.

- Wipeout 1/2097 can be made to run at 60fps by setting CPU overclock to 250%. Try to set GTE Overclock to off at the same time unless you want to increase CPU requirements even more (probably needlessly).

See all the Youtube videos we have made so far -

Wipeout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwKydycZZU&t=9s

Soul Blade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXTRD4hkL_k

Chrono Cross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHoJcHLtNCk

Jumping Flash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwP8gKXLcSY

Battle Arena Toshinden 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYmScQCgUQc

King's Field

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6i0F5OTEPE

Exhumed / Powerslave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhcU5ohn8Eg

Silent Hill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cki0kCGD36Q

Quake II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW7-3UrUSOU

Doom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF_iZyD-lQ0

Echo Night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaSG3Yb1kOE

MDK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGcL3okIDTk

Duke Nukem - Total Meltdown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVqxn-nuWn8

Star Wars: Dark Forces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d293Y_Uek3M

Shadow Tower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SayOf-3zVc

Nightmare Creatures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk9CVAwrnKw

Loaded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vowodiquYYw

Files

Beetle PSX - CPU Overclocking - True 60fps Wipeout PS1 with 250% overclocking!

Shown here is a video of Wipeout running on RetroArch with the Beetle PSX libretro emulator core ,using 250% CPU overclocking and GTE overclocking. System specs : Intel Core i7 7700k 16GB RAM Nvidia Titan XP OS: Windows 10 There are still some dips to 41-ish fps. You can iron these out by overclocking even higher. However, be aware that this all can tend to be rather CPU intensive right now. Beetle PSX is still using only a CPU interpreter core after all. If we want much better performance later on, Beetle PSX will require the use of a dynamic recompiler in order to get big performance gains. This CPU overclocking method comes courtesy of simias, and you can tweak the percentage of overclocking to your heart's desire. For more info, see this article - https://www.patreon.com/posts/beetle-psx-cpu-16891128