Beetle PSX HW - "Castlevania Symphony of The Night" low fps

I’m having a weird problem with Castlevania Symphony of The Night. After certain time of playing in the first area of the game, the sound starts to stutter and the fps drop from ~60 to ~40.

It is weird because I don’t have that problem with any other game, e.g… Tekken 3, WipeOut, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater… I tried many different configuration options (audio sync on/off, video sync on/off, adding extra audio lag…) without success. So, I decided to monitor CPU usage (i5-4250U for reference) to see if that was the cause…

(in the above plot, everything was fine ~60 fps until the last seconds where they drop and I stopped the emulation)

So that doesn’t seem to be the issue. On the other hand, the sound also stutters a bit when loading a save game from the memory card in the starting menu which also makes me believe that it’s not a performance issue but a missconfiguration (or maybe a core bug/limitation?).

Another interesting thing is that, once the fps have dropped, some changes in the configuration make them increase back to normal. e.g. changing dither from 16 to 32 bits (another indication that the problem is not caused by a lack of CPU performance).

So, what are your experiences with this game? anybody else having similar issues? suggestion about the configuration?

Regards and thanks in advance.

very strange.

Are your power settings set to ‘max performance’? Do you have rewind enabled?

Hi, hunterk

Yes, I had the “dynamic” performance option activated in the BIOS and set to max performance. But I just completely disabled it and I still have the problem. About the rewind option, no, it’s disabled.