[nexocc]

I am having a hard time trying to find the best options to have selected. I am currently trying to play Kingdom Hearts. Sometimes when I get hit I hear a popping sound. Rarely while playing, the game speed will drop to around 80% making the sound and video get choppy. During cut scenes, if a lot is going on the game speed will again lower.

Some hopefully useful info:
4 GB of ram
32-bit
GeForce 8800GT
I am using 2 monitors, the main one is at 1680x1050 and the secondary one is 1280x1024

I tried following the guide which explains what everything means and did what I thought best, but this only made it worse. What I did made it look better but the game speed fell to 50% no matter what was going on. So I reinstalled the program making it easier to start over and changed a couple of things which is where I am currently.

I would like to sacrifice quality for performance (unless I can have both obviously)

Any help would be much appreciated and I will gladly give any other info that I missed.

 

[Princess Garnet]

Enable the MTGS/dual core option. That's honestly the biggest speed difference maker right there.

 

[nexocc]

I didn't think I had that capability. I tried your suggestion and my cpu usage went from 35% to 99%, what does this mean?

 

[Princess Garnet]

What about speed? Did it go up?

You have a dual core CPU, so you should enable it. It makes a huge speed impact.

I may be wrong in some of this, but I think it basically let's the graphics system of the emulated Playstation 2 have it's own core, and the main core is left to the main CPU (the Emotion Engine), and all of the other small CPUs and such. There's no reason to disable it.

CPU usage went up because it's now using both cores (a maximum of 100%) instead of one core (a maximum of 50%, but it may be higher due to some background tasks).

Edit: Also, switch to the SSE4.1 version of GSdx. Your CPU has that instruction set.

I'd also recommend to disable native mode. Your GPU can handle 1024x1024, and with a 640x480 resolution, that'll be enough to make it look much better.

So, yes, it will be possible to make it look good and run fast on your system.

 

[nexocc]

With GSdx 4.1 enabled and native turned off the quality looks great and I only see hiccups when i transition between areas. Other than that game speed stays at 99-100%. Thank you so much for your help.