PPSSPP Feature Request Page

[LunaMoo]

^ The behaviour you're describing looks like caused by your OS throttling. That means it runs at lower clocks, because it doesn't consider load it has as worth clocking higher. This would typically happen on mobile platforms as they're very restrictive and aren't designed to run at their advertised power for longer than a few seconds if at all. When you unthrottle without limits it just decides to provide more power for a while.

If you're on android, PPSSPP at most can request running in sustained mode(there's an option for that in system settings). It will cause android device that supports it to lock the power somewhere between it's max power and the low power it wants to run which might result in slightly better performance in cases where it wants to stick to low clocks all the time.

But that's really all, well you could try activating "Force real clock sync" in system settings hoping that slight increase in cpu usage causes your device to profile PPSSPP differently, but chances are it will do nothing or slow things down even more. You could also run different, more cpu intensive(but less graphically) app in the background or find some root-requiring app that can mess with your device power states enforcing it to run at higher power(potentially risking with a fire hazard or small explosion since again modern phones can't sustain their power and use it at most in short bursts).

Otherwise just use frameskipping or auto frameskipping as much as you need to run the game at full speed within the power that your device OS decides to run.;]

The only reason unthrottle appears to "help" and also why it might look "broken"(it really isn't) is because when trying to go above 100% speed on some operating systems like android, PPSSPP has to skip frames which means the higher it goes, the more intensive cpu emulation get's relatively to everything else causing your OS to profile it as more demanding app and allowing to push it even further. PPSSPP doesn't have anything it could waste comparable amounts of cpu power on, it's just optimized too well. Some debug features could probably waste enough time like frame profiler which happily eats up tons of cpu time on timing everything, but those are not available in user builds and hide the game under tons of overlay info which isn't particulary useful to end user;p.