Hi. I'm playing emulated Driver using pcsxr on Linux. Sometimes, when I'm being chased by three or more police cars for example, I'm observing a drop rate (from ~59 fps to ~45 fps). I first thought my computer (which is an old i3 540!), but I soon changed my mind because of two reasons:
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I was playing 1080p, but when I decreased resolution to 480p, this problem persisted.
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When I disabled emulator frame rate limiting, it jumped to ~120 fps and it dropped to only ~90 fps on other situations. Well, it is impossible to play the game in this situation as it seems you are playing in fast-forward mode.
Because of that, I thought that the game itself could be dropping frames in some situations. Maybe it is considering the limitations of original PS1 hardware and prefer to drop frames instead of delaying the game itself? If this is right, it is impossible to "fix" it changing the emulator configuration. Unfortunately I have no PS1 original hardware to test it myself.
Thanks!
P.S.: I recently discovered there is a Driver game for PC which seems to run much better, but now I'm past half of the PS1 version, so it is not worth to start it over again :-)
With eg duckstation you can overclock the emulated cpu of the ps1 and overcome performance issues which also happened on original hardware in some games. In some cases it will cause issues on its own like weird physics glitches or faster gameplay. But as far as i remember driver and driver 2 were games which profited from the "virtual" overclock with no added issues. Depending on the hardware it can be a pretty heavy hit on the performance of the real cpu though. Duckstation itself is probably also a bit more performance hungry on itself. But it might be worth a try since in the best case you just need to transfer the memory card save file and keep playing on duckstation where you left of on pcsxr.