Significant lag in Crabby Beach

[crane476]

Happens mostly in the opening area on the beach. The 2nd area after you unlock the door is fine.

[crane476]

I'm not sure if this can be fixed or not. This slowdown also occurs on the original hardware and in emulation.

Settings

Version: 0.2.1
Renderer: OpenGL
Supersampling: 2x (Lag still occurs on 1x)
Fullscreen: Borderless
Texture Filtering: Nearest
Antialiasing: On
Perspective textures: Enabled
Screen model: CRT
VSync: On
BIOS: OpenBIOS (Switching to Official BIOS makes no difference)

[mstan]

Thanks for flagging!

As discussed in Discord, this appears to actually be authentic behavior (meaning PSXRecomp is doing too good of a job being faithful).

This doesn't disqualify it from being a bug by any means, but I am going to classify it as an enhancement request. Once I have some downtime, I'm going to try to dig in here and see if I can't smooth this area out.

[srjghseruikg]

Well, every stage has significant lag in some form, especially the stages from Crabby Beach onward, this is just how it performed on the playstation.
I would assume, for this to actually be solved, the game's speed would have to be untied from its framerate, and whatever other aspect of performance + framerate also overhauled. It actually seems to happen way more as the game progresses from then because of how complex the stages get.

[mstan]

Done right, the game should be decoupled from the original hardware. There's some trickiness with some of the overlay sharding with Ape Escape I addressed recently that should help.

There's likely some performance optimizations that psxrecomp could undergo. I recently went through this with ndsrecomp just the same. But from a practicality standpoint, there's no reason it shouldn't be able to tuned to run without slowdown like how snesrecomp is able to eliminate the slowdown in games for the Super NES.

Will keep iterating on it! In the meantime, can you try the most recent 0.2.1 for Ape Escape that was released?

[srjghseruikg]

Slowdown on crabby + the rest of the stages i've tested are about the same between 0.2-latest 0.2.1. Haven't noticed any full on regressions either.
*Which reminds me of something i was considering creating a separate issue for but it may just be relevant enough for this thread, the UI tends to lag quite a bit, When going to gadget select and opening the other menus. It causes the audio to sound as if the game is dropping frames.