Shadow of the Colossus: Difference between revisions

The game's performance varies significantly depending on the CPU being used to run it. PCSX2 runs better on Intel CPU's than their AMD equivalents, and so does ''Shadow of the Colossus''. However, AMD CPUs are more appropriately designed for gaming PC's and often represent good value for money when it comes to price vs performance in general. If you can afford it, a high end Intel CPU is recommended, but otherwise, my recommendations for both brands are just below. Remember, PCSX2 only uses 2 CPU Cores, so provided that the clock-rates are high enough, the game should be playable. Also note that SOTC is one of the most CPU intensive games on PCSX2, so you should use these recommendations as your bottleneck for running the emulator in general.

Regardless of what your computer is used for, Intel CPUs are definitely recommended. My recommendation is the '''i7-4770K Quad-Core 3.5 GHz''', which currently sells for $349.99 on average. With the appropriate Speedhacks enabled, it will easily achieve over 30 frames-per-second (and possibly 60 if over-clocked to at least 4.0 GHz). There will still be a few slowdowns at some points, but they are extremely minor and rare. This is one of the best possible ways to run Shadow of the Colossus on PCSX2.

===AMD Processors ===

AMD processors are generally cheaper than their Intel equivalents, but they don't perform as well with PCSX2 because they are designed more for PC gaming than for running advanced softwares. If you're short of cash, I'd recommend the '''FX-8350 Octo-Core 4.0 GHz''', which costs $195.00 on average. It will run at about 20-30 frames-per-second for the most part (with the correct Speedhacks enabled), but it will sometimes drop to the 15-20 fps territory (mostly during the ending cutscenes). On rare, specific occasions, it will suffer from minor (albeit not unplayable) slowdowns.

The main reason for this lies within the Piledriver micro-architecture; in FX processors, the number of Floating-Point Units is half the total number of CPU Cores. This means that each unit is shared between two cores. If one core is currently using the FPU, the other one sharing it must wait to do the same. PCSX2 makes heavy use of Floating-Point operations.