Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition [BLES01765]

Hey you guys seem to have forgotten that this and all versions of DS are playable, I've noticed quite a bit of other games were moved but not this one.

Hey you guys seem to have forgotten that this and all versions of DS are playable, I've noticed quite a bit of other games were moved but not this one.

Nobody has done reports for the other versions of Dark Souls to move to playable, but we need to wait for Ani to update the compatibility list before the website shows it as playable

The game runs stable at 30 fps but it there was some kind of stuttering, but the framerate graph shows that the framerate is stable. After a while I found out that the motion blur is laggy, but everything else runs fine. Unfortunately this also causes motion sickness for me. Can anyone confirm that motion blur is laggy? If this is not just for me, I would even degrade the status to Ingame since it also makes the game look pretty laggy in general, which makes combat difficult.

Unfortunately I forgot to save the log because I downgraded rpcs3 to a version from june to test if this was a regression, which it does not appear to be, but there were some warnings about desync.

I might also have found the reason for the crash. When it froze I looked into the log window and saw the following (I snapped a screenshot but it is all text, so you do not get an image of text):

Code:

E RSX: FIFO: CALL found inside a subroutine (last cmd = 0x2) x21
F {RSX [0x0394ce0]} SIG: Thread terminated due to fatal error: Dead FIFO commands queue state has been detected!
Try increasing "Driver Wake-Up Delay" setting in Advanced settings. Called from
(in file /path/to/rpcs3/build/rpcs3/rpcs3/Emu/RSX/RSXFIFO.cpp:476, in function run_FIFO) (errno=11)

I did not try to play with this setting yet. If I do so, I will also reply again with a proper log and hope to not get motion sick again while trying to reproduce the freeze.

Turn on the frame time graph and prepare to have your mind blown. That is how the game has always been.

Turn on the frame time graph and prepare to have your mind blown. That is how the game has always been.

There is no way this is normal. This is not how it was back on a real PS3 when i played it. It looks fine on playthroughs of that on a PS3 on youtube, too.

---

I just confirmed that it is indeed the frametime. It is going wild (see screenshot). The status should be downgraded to Ingame if this is not affecting just me.
Thanks for the tip about checking the frametime, it makes perfect sense and every time it looks like it is stuttering but the framerate is still 30, the frametime is going wild like that.

   

On the bright side, I did play for half an hour and did not experience any crashes. Hooray. Log attached. Driver Wake-Up Delay: 400 might have done the trick. When I first tested 200 it was very crashy but this looks fine. Needs further testing but unfortunately I got motion sick again and can't test that right away.
All the cache misses may be the reason for the frametime issue.

Dude that is exactly how it is on PS3. I own a PS3, I beat the game on it. It is also like that on Xbox and PC.

Yes, when I boot up PTDE without DSFix, it’s a stuttery mess.

Dude that is exactly how it is on PS3. I own a PS3, I beat the game on it. It is also like that on Xbox and PC.

Yes, when I boot up PTDE without DSFix, it’s a stuttery mess.

It works just fine on PS3 (minus blighttown obviously). Counting blighttown (also maybe depths) as the whole game isnt really helping. If the whole game was effectively 10-15 fps and making people motionsick, nobody would have played it.

I did some more testing and the frametime got a tiny bit better with the latest performance optimizations (https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/pull/11491). Disabling SPU loop detection is mandatory, very similar to DS2 https://forums.rpcs3.net/thread-197775.html. No visible performance degradation with that disabled.

I have the feeling there is a giant bottleneck somewhere causing the insane frametime and my test save is still in the undead burg. It definitely does not happen on my PS3 and it also looks fine in youtube playthroughs. If anyone can confirm the performance degradation, please do comment since it is not playable currently and should be downgraded to ingame.
Since it was marked as Playable earlier, I wonder if this was a regression.

Edit: Normal dark souls is affected as well it appears: https://forums.rpcs3.net/thread-177155-p...#pid316572

So I recorded a video of me emulating that game. I used ffmpeg with the ultrafast preset to record so it does not affect my framerate and frametime that much.

https://vimeo.com/676644099

As you can see, the framerate is (almost) constantly 30 fps. I feel like you can especially see the stutter with the motion blur when the character is running.