DraStic

What is Frameskip?

Fareezad Zakaria wrote:What is Frameskip ?

DraStic will skip a certain number of frames in order to emulate faster.

So how about the graphic if I set my frameskip to lower or high?

I play with 0 FS, High Res and Multithreaded 3D Render both turned on, some games require FS to run normally.

Depends on your devices specs.

A 1,2GHz CPU, Quad core and 1GB RAM device can handle games without FS.

Thanks

Just to be clear I overclocked my device to msximum 1.2GHz CPU to run HR+MT3DR smoothly without FS on.

I can also apply filters at the same time without lag.

Frameskipping is is telling the emulator to not worry about emulating each of the 60 frames that happen per second. This effectively runs the game at a lower frames-per-second (fps) which lowers the demands on the hardware (your android device)

What does it mean to the average player
- a emulator with frame skipping on will have more jerkyness in motion because the frames of motion between point a and point b that you see were skipped (not shown to you). This is more apparent in higher frameskipping levels.

- in 2d fighting games and rythm games (frame sensitive games) this can cause inputs to be delayed enough to cause issues in trying to play, and in high frame skipping scenarios some percise action games (castlevania/2d metroid/maybe mario) can be effected adversely.

- less resources used means less slowdowns and broken crackling audio. Usually framesiipping can help fix audio breaking due to the device not being to handle it and the visuals at the same time.

TL;DR

If you are playing a game that does not require timing percision (pokemon, final fantasy, most rpgs) then frameskipping migh make the percieved fluidness go down in order to speed up the game overall (until it hits full speed). In games that require percision in timing it will possibly cause more issues then it fixes and should be avoided if you can.

I recommend to generally keep frameskip set to auto with a limit of 4 or so. This way frames will be skipped if there's a sudden burst of activity, instead of causing the music to crack and sudden slowdowns. And for lower end devices that need frameskip to maintain real time speed this is by far preferable.

The only caveat is that frameskip can sometimes cause graphical glitches, and in a few uncommon cases even break gameplay. This is because the game reads back the frame (that's now skipped) and does other things with it. I'd like to implement an option at some point to force it so frames aren't skipped if they could be read back. But there's some other stuff that needs to be done to really make this effective, basically the two screens need to be skipped separately.

So far I don't face a problem when using DraStic.I'm glad someone create this emulator so that I can play all DS game that I want.Thank You