0.9.9.1 around 30% slower with same exact settings as 0.9.8

[DanteDraconi]

Title kinda self-explanatory
Playing on 0.9.8 makes perfect 60fps without any slowdown on any point, the moment I (cleanly on a new folder) switched to 0.9.9.1 and setting it up exactly the same as 0.9.8 made all games run at 30-40fps with choppy sound and slowdowns

Main settings:
Buffered rendering
Post-processing: Off
Rendering resolution: 4x
Mipmapping, HW transform, Vertex cache: On
Texture scaling: 5x Hybrid+Bicubic
16x Anisotroping
Multithread: Disabled (Tried both on/off)
I/O on thread: Enabled

Specs:
Intel Core i5-4670K @ 3.4ghz (4 CPUs)
8gb RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 2gb GDDR5

[[Unknown]]

There are new settings in v0.9.9.1. This will vary significantly depending on the game, though.

For example, if the game is blending in a way that we didn't properly support before, it now will (with default settings.) However, this comes at a cost to performance. You can check the "disable slower effects" setting and uncheck "simulate block transfer", which will return you to the same bad graphics as before.

That being said, on your hardware even with why-would-you-even-need-that-much 5x texture scaling, normally you should be fine with these new things.

I do know, from complaints by many people, we made texture scaling trigger for more textures. In v0.9.8, it would actually not scale a bunch of textures, and now it does scale them. If you weren't noticing that textures were not being scaled, you could probably live with 3x texture scaling instead of 5x, which will definitely be faster.

Remember, texture scaling is exponential. 5x requires 25 units of work whereas 3x requires only 9 units of work.

-[Unknown]

[DanteDraconi]

Seems that checking "disable slower effects" was the only thing that worked
What effects does it disable though? The only differences I found was it disabling color overlays and "fake motion blur"

Thank you for the clear and extended answer, really helpful

[[Unknown]]

Hmm, I'm surprised that it caused such a difference on your hardware. What game is it?

Yes, that will disable CLUT (palette) processing of rendered textures, as well as certain complicated blending effects that OpenGL doesn't natively support. Both should be faster using a lower render resolution, but it must be doing something a lot to be slow on your hardware.

Specifically, disabling slower effects will:
* Sometimes cause black flicker in uncommon cases of render target size change.
* Initialize all render targets as blank, rather than using the current render data (causes some rare stencil testing issues.)
* Ignore shared depth buffers (not used by many games, but will break e.g. Jeanne d'Arc.)
* Allow texturing directly from a buffer to itself (not uesd by many games, undefined behavior in OpenGL, usually causes blocky artifacts.)
* Replace absolute-difference blending with max blending (not commonly used, causes weird graphical artifacts and boxes.)
* Skip the use of a shader lookup to apply precise blending (these modes are not commonly used, but it only uses the lookup when needed; may cause some things to be dark or too bright.)
* Skip applying a CLUT (palette) transformation to rendered buffers. This can cause things to be overly dark, bloom to be too bright or missing, and lots of other things.
* Avoid flushing rendering early when a buffer textures from itself (mainly impacts Ridge Racer iirc.)

So, it changes a lot of things. Definitely could impact color overlays or motion blur. Maybe there's a way to improve the performance on the game you're playing, though, with those effects.

-[Unknown]

[DanteDraconi]

Just tried a few more without disabling slower effects
Rockband (US) slows on menu and gameplay, also has a drop when you get "perfect combo"
Wipeout pulse (EU) slows on menu, gameplay fine, but now ships flicker between black and textured
Patapon 2 (EU) As good as 0.9.8
ATV Offroad fury pro (US) Same as 0.9.8
Tekken 6 (US) As good as 0.9.8
Jackass (US) Unplayable at all

So, the most troublesome game seems rockband after all

[[Unknown]]

Wipeout ships flickering... I think that means you have the texture coord speedhack enabled.

Don't know much about the two with problems since I don't have either. I thought people reported Tekken 6 was faster (also we've got some bugs fixed in one of the Tekkens, I think Tekken 6.) But then on desktop it probably won't matter.

-[Unknown]