Any way to improve the FPS of DS Games?

[Gustavo]

Hi! The four Zero games runs perfectly but the DS games runs at 50 FPS. I tried to change the layout to a small screen and gets 55~56 FPS.
My PC is not a PC gaming but here's the configs:
I3 3.9Ghz - Intel HD 630 (integrated
8 Gb Ram (single channel)
I know its not a gaming PC but any help is appreciate. Love this series, beated them all in my Nintendo 3DS.

[CrowRising]

The Zero games are also based on the versions from the DS collection, so all six games are "technically" DS games. I say technically because all six games are actually straight ports of the DS versions to PC running at higher native resolution and on a more modern framework.

This might not be what you want to hear, but the reason for the slowdown is because the collection has a stubborn framelock set to 60fps. If your PC is unable to run smoothly at 60fps, the internal logic of the game slows down to the fastest speed your PC actually can run smoothly. To put it simply, your PC is underpowered. Though, considering you're only slowing down to 50fps, I'd assume not by much.

With that in mind, you do have some options available to you. The most obvious but also probably the most expensive is to upgrade your PC. Integrated GPU's in particular are infamous for often having poor performance when it comes to gaming, but a weak CPU can also be the source of your bottlecap. A pretty good guideline to compare your own specs to is the Steam Store page, scroll down to the minimum recommended specs. These aren't always strictly the minimum specs a game will run fine at, but they're a good baseline because it's the minimum hardware the game is outright confirmed to run on.

A somewhat less expensive option than upgrading your whole PC would be to buy a Steam Deck. The collection does have some minor issues trying to run it "out of the box" so to speak on Steam Deck hardware, but there are things you can do to fix it up to run pretty much flawlessly.

A little bit on the risky side is overclocking or undervolting your GPU and/or CPU. I'm not an expert on either of these processes so I don't know if an integrated card can even have such things done to it, but both of these things are known ways to boost performance. The less risky in regards to damaging your hardware is undervolting, and in fact it can boost the lifetime expectancy of your hardware, though you will have to do a lot of manual tweaking with it to maximize your results and it can lead to software crashing due to instabilities. I'd recommend against doing either of these things if you don't know what you are doing.

Finally, as far as I'm aware the only other thing you can do is try to make sure your PC is doing as little else as possible while running the game. That means don't keep open internet tabs in the background, and close any other unnecessary apps on your PC that might be hogging system resources.

The absolute last resort option would be to just play a different version of the collection on another system such as PS4 or Switch, or to legally emulate the original versions of the 6 titles in the collection. That means taking physical copies of the games you purchased and dumping the files from them onto your PC to run in an emulator.

[Gustavo]

Originally posted by CrowRising:

The Zero games are also based on the versions from the DS collection, so all six games are "technically" DS games. I say technically because all six games are actually straight ports of the DS versions to PC running at higher native resolution and on a more modern framework.

This might not be what you want to hear, but the reason for the slowdown is because the collection has a stubborn framelock set to 60fps. If your PC is unable to run smoothly at 60fps, the internal logic of the game slows down to the fastest speed your PC actually can run smoothly. To put it simply, your PC is underpowered. Though, considering you're only slowing down to 50fps, I'd assume not by much.

With that in mind, you do have some options available to you. The most obvious but also probably the most expensive is to upgrade your PC. Integrated GPU's in particular are infamous for often having poor performance when it comes to gaming, but a weak CPU can also be the source of your bottlecap. A pretty good guideline to compare your own specs to is the Steam Store page, scroll down to the minimum recommended specs. These aren't always strictly the minimum specs a game will run fine at, but they're a good baseline because it's the minimum hardware the game is outright confirmed to run on.

A somewhat less expensive option than upgrading your whole PC would be to buy a Steam Deck. The collection does have some minor issues trying to run it "out of the box" so to speak on Steam Deck hardware, but there are things you can do to fix it up to run pretty much flawlessly.

A little bit on the risky side is overclocking or undervolting your GPU and/or CPU. I'm not an expert on either of these processes so I don't know if an integrated card can even have such things done to it, but both of these things are known ways to boost performance. The less risky in regards to damaging your hardware is undervolting, and in fact it can boost the lifetime expectancy of your hardware, though you will have to do a lot of manual tweaking with it to maximize your results and it can lead to software crashing due to instabilities. I'd recommend against doing either of these things if you don't know what you are doing.

Finally, as far as I'm aware the only other thing you can do is try to make sure your PC is doing as little else as possible while running the game. That means don't keep open internet tabs in the background, and close any other unnecessary apps on your PC that might be hogging system resources.

The absolute last resort option would be to just play a different version of the collection on another system such as PS4 or Switch, or to legally emulate the original versions of the 6 titles in the collection. That means taking physical copies of the games you purchased and dumping the files from them onto your PC to run in an emulator.

Guess I should play ZX and ZX Advent in the future so.
Thanks for the answer.

[CrowRising]

Originally posted by Gustavo:

Guess I should play ZX and ZX Advent in the future so.
Thanks for the answer.

One more thing I forgot to mention: You could also try lowering the resolution in the options menu, and try toggling on/off vsync to see if that makes a difference. You can use third party programs such as Magpie (which is free) or Lossless Scaling (Which is cheap here on Steam) to play fullscreen without sacrificing performance while running at lower resolutions, just keep in mind that playing with the resolution set too low will degrade the visuals significantly.

[Gustavo]

Originally posted by CrowRising:

Originally posted by Gustavo:

Guess I should play ZX and ZX Advent in the future so.
Thanks for the answer.

One more thing I forgot to mention: You could also try lowering the resolution in the options menu, and try toggling on/off vsync to see if that makes a difference. You can use third party programs such as Magpie (which is free) or Lossless Scaling (Which is cheap here on Steam) to play fullscreen without sacrificing performance while running at lower resolutions, just keep in mind that playing with the resolution set too low will degrade the visuals significantly.

Thanks!