Once you've reached the main menu of the emulator, uncheck the Show Console option from the Miscellaneous settings menu, so that the emulator will stop neurotically printing a log of every step it takes. Next, open Emulation Settings from the Config menu, and click the Speedhacks tab.
The default settings there are a bit conservative, so check the Enable speedhacks box, turn the 'EE Cyclerate' and 'VU Cycle Stealing' options to 1, and enable the m. VU Block Hack. In the unlikely event that anything goes wrong with a game you're playing, come back here and disable these. Close the menu, and you can run some games. The only game that I wish were a little less sluggish is God Hand, Capcom's underappreciated quasi- masterpiece brawler, which struggles to move at more than 4. Frameskip doesn't help, unfortunately, because the GPU is scarcely taxed more than it would be in trying to render any early- aughts PC game; the problem is the CPU struggling to keep the PS2's multiple cores chattering together at a decent clip.
This is the case with emulators of most . In some cases, emulation necessitates that the PC's CPU handle graphics- processing functions of the emulated console (thereby compounding the existing bottleneck), and PCSX2's VSync is one such emulator. Just don't enable VSync, and hopefully you won't miss it. To comment on this article and other PCWorld content, visit our Facebook page or our Twitter feed.