Various issues with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSN)

Aspect Ratio:
1) When booting the game with a Global Configuration the game is always stretched to 16x9. Changing the GPU option to 4:3 has no effect even after closing the emulator, opening the emulator and then starting the game. RPCS3 application window is 16x9 and the games graphics are wider/fatter than they should be.

2) When booting the game with a Custom Configuration the game is always displayed in 4:3. Changing the GPU option to 16x9 has no effect even after closing the emulator, opening the emulator and then starting the game (this is an issue in so far that the option is being ignored, the game is supposed to be played in 4:3). RPCS3 application window is 4:3 and the games graphics are displayed at the correct Aspect Ratio.

Another words the AR option in the Global Configuration and the Custom Configuration UI's seem useless. All tests were performed multiple times and I always used the "Remove > Custom Configuration" option when testing the Global Configuration.

Performance:
1) When booting the game with a Global Configuration with 600% upscaling, the CPU utilization hovers around 50% and GPU utilization hovers around 50%. Frame Rate is a consistent 60 FPS.

2) When booting the game with a Custom Configuration with 600% upscaling, the CPU utilization hovers around 50% and GPU utilization hovers around 100%. Frame Rate is a fairly consistent 45 FPS.

As far as I can tell all Custom Configuration settings match the Global Configuration so the performance disparity is inexplicable. There must be setting differences that aren't exposed in the GUI. All tests were performed multiple times and I always used the "Remove > Custom Configuration" option when testing the Global Configuration.


System specifications:
RPCS3 v0.0.11-10809-21b535b5 Alpha | HEAD | Firmware version: 4.86
Windows 10 x64 (2004)
Ryzen 3700X
Geforce 1070Ti (451.85)
16GB 3600MHz RAM
ASUS Crosshair Hero VIII (WiFi) motherboard with the latest UEFI

Edit: I do not want to get in to a discussion on the merits of upscaling in this game, I already provided visual evidence on Discord that it is visually beneficial (and people ignored it while continually implying I was delusional and insisting I shouldn't upscale, while I was trying to get answers to the performance and AR issue).

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Edit: So it turns out RPCS3 does not tell you the Base Resolution being used for rendering and for whatever reason the game is seemingly being rendered at a higher 4:3 resolution when using a Custom Configuration than the 16:9 resolution that the Global Configuration uses. This of course means resolution scaling has a bigger impact and is why I was getting performance issues when running the game in the only known way to get the program to render it in 4:3.

Also, it would be fantastic if someone could figure out how to tweak the filtering setting in the PS1 emulator to Nearest Neighbour/not bilinear. As far as I can tell the PS1 emulator's system menu is not accessible when playing on RPCS3 and the PS1 emulator that the PS3 release uses defaults to awful bilinear filtering.

If this is achievable I wouldn't need to do any resolution upscaling to minimize the blur because there wouldn't be any blur!

Can you please upload a log file with global and one with custom configs?

Here's a log file of me running the game twice, once with the Custom Profile applied and again with the Global Profile applied. Sorry for the lateness of my response.

Other than this discrepency in behaviour between Global and Custom Configuration, the game plays fine so long as Asynchronous Texture Streaming isn't enabled. The only downside to playing the game via RPCS3 is that you can't access the PS1 emulator's system menu to turn off the bilinear filtering.