FF7 works fine, but I'm still not satisfied

[Palin]

So I stumbled across the FF7 modding community recently and decided to dig up my old PC copy of FF7 (I still have the crazy parallelogram box and everything.) After picking and choosing through the mods I ended up installing the following:

The v1.02 patch
The Saint's Hi-res patch
YAMP by dsiugo (for the minigame fix)

I didn't go for the NPC replacer patch because it changed the visual style too much, and when I tried patching the mp3 OST in using Ficedula's mod it ended up 1) not working and 2) making the game run like ass. So on to my problem. Simply put, the game hiccups. This isn't anything game breaking, it's just that when I'm running around, it's obvious that the screen isn't refreshing at a very high FPS (I don't know if its possible to display an FPS counter but visually I can tell that it's jumpy.) Maybe the hi-res patch is really demanding but I have trouble believing that my brand new computer with an FX7900gs and Intel Core2 Duo can't run this ancient game smooth as silk.

So my question is, is there anything that I should change in my configuration for my sound or graphics card that might be interfering with the smooth operation of the game? Or should I just shut up and live with slight imperfections? I already had to disable FFDShow's truemotion codec to fix the movie playback but maybe there's something I can configure under the graphics card advanced options that would help smooth things out?

[EmperorSteele]

A mod will likely intervien, but since your issue is most likely mod related, you should probably have posted this in the Game Tweaking section.

However, you should try running the game without any mods (just 1.02) and see if you still have the same problems.  The high-res patch isn't very demanding.. Evne with it applied, your graphics card is doing far less work than with any other modern game.  However, just outof curiosity, what ARE your system specs  (processor, memory, hd, graphics card)?

[Palin]

Ok, after reinstalling and trying the game again at various resolutions maybe I'm just being a bit spoiled. It isn't that the frame rate is consistently low, it's just when the game is doing a full screen redraw, like with a moving background or when the camera rotates in battle, it's slightly jerky. Since it's the same with or without mods, with or without my second screen active, I'm inclined to believe that the game behaved the same way back when I used to play it on my old Gateway. For the hell of it though, here's my system stats:

Intel Core 2 6300 (1.86ghz)
2 gigs of DDR2 (I can't remember the brand or clock speed)
Nvidia GeForce 7900gs

Windows XP service pack 2
Nvidia driver 6.14.10.9371
DirectX 9.0c

I sometimes run two monitors but I've tried FF7 with and without the second screen disabled and it doesn't seem to have any effect.

[DLPB_]

I second this.  I have the exact same problem.  When the camera is panning across something like for example, from top to bottom of the midgar zolom, it is smooth for a number of frames then skip, this cycle continues until the pan is finished.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?  Very irritating.  I have tried to force vsync and whatnot to no avail. 

[Terid__K]

This is normal. FPS limits in FF7 are 15fps in battles, 30fps in towns/world map and 60fps on the menus. If you increase these values, it will only make FF7 run faster, not smoother.

You'll have to live with that, sorry.

EDIT: Oh, I just noticed you have a dual core CPU. In that case, you HAVE to set the affinity to only one core when running FF7, otherwise FF7 will run jumpy all the time (more than normal, I mean).

[DLPB_]

I have set to 1 cpu.

But I don't understamd how 30 fps makes the game jump....this doesn't make any sense at all.  The original game was 25/30 fps for the psx and that has no problems with a weird jump every 2 seconds during a pan.

There is no such jump in battle screens or characters moving about...it is just the panning.  I will show you an example soon, but the frame limiter can't be the be all and end all.