We do a whole bunch of non-threadsafe stuff, especially in the UI, and I'm
probably not going to get around to implementing a threadsafe framework
for interaction between the UI and the CPU thread anytime soon. See issue
8220.
Won't work with all games, but provides a nice way to spend extra CPU to make
a variable framerate game faster (e.g. Spyro or The Last Story), or to make
a game use less CPU at the cost of a lower framerate (e.g. Rogue Leader).
This hack is there for quite a long time, and lots of games crashes if it's disabled.
But it's still a hack, so it shouldn't be enabled hard coded. This commit create a new
ini option for this hack which is enabled by default.
Maybe some games does still run very fine without this hack.
This isn't technically the correct place to have the downcount variable, but it is similar to what PPSSPP does to gain a bit of extra speed on ARM.
We access this variable quite a bit, with each exit in a block it is subtracted from.
On ARM this required four instructions to load and store the value, while now it only requires two.
This gives an average of 1FPS gain to most games.
Examples:
Crazy Taxi: 54FPS -> 55FPS
Luigi's Mansion: 20FPS -> 21FPS
Wind Waker(Save Screen): 27FPS -> 28FPS
This seems to average a 6mhz to 16mhz CPU core emulation improvement in the few games I've tested.