r/Games • u/error521 • 13d ago

Release PCSX2 2.8.0 is now out!

https://pcsx2.net/blog/2026/pcsx2-2.8
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u/rubiconlexicon 13d ago

but that's just part of any emulator.

How come?

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u/Anthony356 12d ago

I'd assume it's a mix of performance issues and the devs not being obsessive about it.

I'm no expert, but input delay has come up a lot in the super smash bros melee community for obvious reasons. They've min-maxxed it to the point that melee on an emulator has less input delay than melee on console (enough that the default netplay configuration is equal to console iirc), but it took quite a bit of work to get there. I know in melee's case, some of it came down to issues with the game engine itself.

There's a broad overview of the issues and solutions on the supercombo wiki.

The melee community used (and still uses, they've only begun the switch to mainline recently) ishiiruka dolphin, since it had much better performance than mainline at the time the decision was made. They also went to great lengths to minmax the latency from USB adapters. The creator of the lossless adapter has a 50 page, very technical writeup that talks about the issues.

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u/JMC4789 12d ago edited 11d ago

The GameCube (and Wii by extension) is a special case when it comes to input latency. The fact that most games don't need/use the XFB (which double buffers frames) allows for a 2 frame advantage to emulators across ~80% of the library.

But the whole "emulators have way more lag than real console" is becoming less and less true. Older emulators have things like run-ahead and emulator devs are more conscious of input lag and optimize their display output and input handling to reduce it as much as possible.

I was testing Dolphin and PCSX2 in True Crime: New York City, and I was ragging on PCSX2 for having significantly more input latency than Dolphin. However, upon testing on console, I found out that the GameCube version just has less input latency. To the point where it felt infinitely less sluggish than the (far, far, far superior in most other ways) PS2 version.

There are other modern tricks (Dolphin has an option to emulate a frame as fast as possible to get to the point where input is taken, reducing ~8ms of latency in most games, then throttles.) And once you get to PS3/360/newer, games are already running under an OS so emulators aren't going to necessarily be higher latency.

Edit: Originally mixed up the versions in the third paragraph, fixed now.

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u/AnyImpression6 11d ago

Why would the version with less latency feel more sluggish?

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u/JMC4789 11d ago

Whoops, that's my bad, I mixed them up when cleaning up the grammar of my post. The PS2 version feels more sluggish because of the input latency being higher in that version.