Pokemon is running slow on my Zenfone

[angelang118]

Hi,

Tbh, I have had a issue with this a long time ago where pokemon was completely unplayable on my Zenfone 6.
I posted here before and got the issue fixed when the developer changed the coding, and putted me into their beta testing group so I can download another version of Drastic. Pokemon was running 100% with no issues back then.

So I decided to play Pokemon after a long long while, and of course, drastic have been updated quite a few times since then.
However, the game is quite laggy when I boot it up, running at around maybe 70% speed.
So I tweaked with the settings a bit and seemed to have found the problem... Whenever I turn off High-Resolution 3D Rendering, Pokemon runs at 100% with no lag. But the graphics are of course, terrible. ><

I am hoping you can help me with the problem as I know it's fixable, since I have played the game at full speed with high resolution 3d rendering on before on this phone.

Thanks, any help would be appreciated.

[TkSilver]

You have many things going against this phone being able to run hi res mode on.

1. It is a dual core z2580 chipset only has 2 cores. Even if you have a optimized instruction set a dual core is going to struggle to run most games in hi rez.

2. Atom chipsets run i86-64 instruction sets. Android is not exactly optimized for this as most devices use Arm instruction sets. Drastic is especially optimized for arm v7 or higher instructions with neon simd enhancement.

See this thread:

http://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2478

This doesn't really count as "HD", but the ability to render the graphics in 2x2 the native resolution (512x384 instead of 256x192) will be included in the next release. We have it working in testing now.

DraStic is different from emulators like PPSSPP in that it doesn't use the Android device's GPU to render 3D graphics. This is because of issues with how DS's graphics work. For that reason, the CPU has to render the graphics, and the resolution enhancement will require a powerful CPU (preferably with 4 cores) to get good speed.

If you remember the performance before DraStic switched to using multiple threads to render 2D and 3D (with the end of 2013 update), I'd say expect the high-res performance on a quad core device to be slightly below what the low-res performance was w/o threading. Maybe lower if your device is throttling clocks heavily with a lot of activity.

The best advice I can give you is to try out some of the shaders from this post
xperia64's post about halfway down the page the shaders.zip file
And see if you can find a nice middle ground between performance and graphics.

[Exophase]

I am hoping you can help me with the problem as I know it's fixable, since I have played the game at full speed with high resolution 3d rendering on before on this phone.

I think you are mistaken here. Your original posts about performance (viewtopic.php?t=2177) were made long before hires rendering was implemented so you couldn't have gotten full speed with it then.

There was an issue with some x86 devices where an Android update caused DraStic to run in ARM emulation mode instead of x86 native mode, which is what caused the slowdown and what was fixed by the beta. But hires rendering adds a ton of extra demand on top of that.

[angelang118]

You have many things going against this phone being able to run hi res mode on.

1. It is a dual core z2580 chipset only has 2 cores. Even if you have a optimized instruction set a dual core is going to struggle to run most games in hi rez.

2. Atom chipsets run i86-64 instruction sets. Android is not exactly optimized for this as most devices use Arm instruction sets. Drastic is especially optimized for arm v7 or higher instructions with neon simd enhancement.

See this thread:

http://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2478

This doesn't really count as "HD", but the ability to render the graphics in 2x2 the native resolution (512x384 instead of 256x192) will be included in the next release. We have it working in testing now.

DraStic is different from emulators like PPSSPP in that it doesn't use the Android device's GPU to render 3D graphics. This is because of issues with how DS's graphics work. For that reason, the CPU has to render the graphics, and the resolution enhancement will require a powerful CPU (preferably with 4 cores) to get good speed.

If you remember the performance before DraStic switched to using multiple threads to render 2D and 3D (with the end of 2013 update), I'd say expect the high-res performance on a quad core device to be slightly below what the low-res performance was w/o threading. Maybe lower if your device is throttling clocks heavily with a lot of activity.

The best advice I can give you is to try out some of the shaders from this post
xperia64's post about halfway down the page the shaders.zip file
And see if you can find a nice middle ground between performance and graphics.

Thanks for the links, I will try some of the shaders and see if there are any changes then.
Shall report afterwards.

[angelang118]

I am hoping you can help me with the problem as I know it's fixable, since I have played the game at full speed with high resolution 3d rendering on before on this phone.

I think you are mistaken here. Your original posts about performance (viewtopic.php?t=2177) were made long before hires rendering was implemented so you couldn't have gotten full speed with it then.

There was an issue with some x86 devices where an Android update caused DraStic to run in ARM emulation mode instead of x86 native mode, which is what caused the slowdown and what was fixed by the beta. But hires rendering adds a ton of extra demand on top of that.

Hm... Perhaps I didn't have the 3d rendering option on back then?
But I do remember that the game was running at 100% after I've joined the beta group. I've also looked at the past emails I had with Lordus and I did say in an reply that everything ran as smooth as butter after I downloaded the beta version.

In terms of graphics though, though it's been almost a year, but I remember very clearly that the graphics were very nice and crisp. At least it's definitely different from what I have now with the 3d rendering option off, to an extent to which words in game are now blurry.

Btw, Lordus's last reply was this:
The problem was, that Google/Intel made a change in one of the latest
updates for Intel Android, which will wrongly use the ARM code instead
of X86 code, if both are included in the app.
The beta version has a workaround, which detects that and forces the
system to use the correct code.

So I'm kind of confused since I do know there is a workaround. Do you think it's possible for me to download that previous version of Drastic? Though his reply was from like a year ago already.. ><

[kaikun97]

You have many things going against this phone being able to run hi res mode on.

1. It is a dual core z2580 chipset only has 2 cores. Even if you have a optimized instruction set a dual core is going to struggle to run most games in hi rez.

My phone has a 1.7GHz Dual core cpu and high res works smooth on all of my games apart from a select few which are sped up with 1 or 2 frameskip. So maybe not all dual core CPUs unless you specifically mean x86 ones

[Exophase]

Hm... Perhaps I didn't have the 3d rendering option on back then?
But I do remember that the game was running at 100% after I've joined the beta group. I've also looked at the past emails I had with Lordus and I did say in an reply that everything ran as smooth as butter after I downloaded the beta version.

In terms of graphics though, though it's been almost a year, but I remember very clearly that the graphics were very nice and crisp. At least it's definitely different from what I have now with the 3d rendering option off, to an extent to which words in game are now blurry.

Btw, Lordus's last reply was this:
The problem was, that Google/Intel made a change in one of the latest
updates for Intel Android, which will wrongly use the ARM code instead
of X86 code, if both are included in the app.
The beta version has a workaround, which detects that and forces the
system to use the correct code.

So I'm kind of confused since I do know there is a workaround. Do you think it's possible for me to download that previous version of Drastic? Though his reply was from like a year ago already.. ><

You probably used a different filter back then. But you definitely didn't use highres 3D because the option wasn't even there, it wasn't in a beta until April this year. You should try changing filters. You're not going to benefit from using an older version, it's a configuration problem.