it had high CPU usage, usually in the 90% to 100% range. At that time I was using Mint 14 with the Nvidia 304 driver. The
emulator's video plugin could be configured to use software or hardware based OpenGL. However, the hardware based option
was experimental and didn't work for me. See the image on the left in the picture below.
Recently I decided to test a newer version of the emulator to see what improvements have been made. I downloaded and installed
the Linux version 1.2.2 of the emulator from the PCSX2 home website. The biggest change is that the video plugin was now able
to use hardware based OpenGL, which has increased it's performance and has had a significant effect in lowering CPU usage. Now
it ranged from 50% to 100%. See the image on the right above. I decided to test the emulator on a Mint 17 RC installation using the
Nvidia 331.67 and 337.19 BETA drivers downloaded from Nvidia's website, and compare the results to using the nouveau driver
and last year's setup.
To use the emulator I first installed these package dependencies in the Synatic Package Manager:
libcg, libcggl, libwxbase2.8-0, libwxgtk2.8-0, libaio1, libglew-dev, libsdl-sound, and nvidia-cg-toolkit
You will need to get the BIOS rom and a game Iso.
For the video plugin choose GSdx and configure it to use OpenGL (Hardware) if using the Nvidia driver. If using the nouveau driver,
then OpenGL (Software) must be selected.
The audio plugin is SPU2-X. Open it's configuration window and under “Interpolation” select “Hermite”. Under “Module” select
“SDL Audio”.
Here are the results from testing, comparing the FPS (frames per second):
Code: Select all
VIDEO DRIVER PCSX2 version GAME 1 GAME 2 CPU Usage
Nvidia 304.43 1.0.0 47 29 90 to 100%
Nouveau 1.2.2 44 31 90 to 100%
Nvidia 331.79 1.2.2 58 47 50 to 100%
Nvidia 337.19 1.2.2 58 51 50 to 100%
The computer I did this testing on is not a gaming system, especially the video card:
AMD Athlon II X2 3.4 Ghz
Nvidia GeForce 210
2 GB Ram