Hi. I'm playing emulated Driver using pcsxr on Linux. Sometimes, when I'm being chased by three or more police cars for example, I'm observing a drop rate (from ~59 fps to ~45 fps). I first thought my computer (which is an old i3 540!), but I soon changed my mind because of two reasons:
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I was playing 1080p, but when I decreased resolution to 480p, this problem persisted.
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When I disabled emulator frame rate limiting, it jumped to ~120 fps and it dropped to only ~90 fps on other situations. Well, it is impossible to play the game in this situation as it seems you are playing in fast-forward mode.
Because of that, I thought that the game itself could be dropping frames in some situations. Maybe it is considering the limitations of original PS1 hardware and prefer to drop frames instead of delaying the game itself? If this is right, it is impossible to "fix" it changing the emulator configuration. Unfortunately I have no PS1 original hardware to test it myself.
Thanks!
P.S.: I recently discovered there is a Driver game for PC which seems to run much better, but now I'm past half of the PS1 version, so it is not worth to start it over again :-)
Slowdown in emulators is actually desirable. I know this might seem like a counterintuitive statement, but as an emulator becomes more accurate, it will need to be able to reproduce hardware specific slowdown by necessity. This led to some emulators being chosen over others because they did not accurately recreate hardware performance (such as ZSNES), thereby avoiding hardware accurate slowdown.
Its possible that in this case, the emulator is accurately recreating what hardware would be experiencing. Its also possible that your hardware running the emulator has a specific instruction incompatibility. One example of this is running Switch emulated games on an old Intel i5 with integrated graphics. The games should run fine, but the integrated graphics have a driver issue within the Vulkan drivers which causes severe slowdown. As such, only simple games like visual novels or 2D heavy games will run at full speed.
There are also some games that are designed around the slowdown in mind, and not just on the PlayStation. For example games developed by Cave like Dodonpachi, Ketsui, etc. slow down on original hardware when there are a lot of bullets on the screen, which intentionally gives the player an easier time to weave through dense bullet patterns even if the character is moving slower too. Rereleases and emulators need to recreate that slowdown otherwise the player is going to have a bad time.
Of course there are games like Driver where the slowdown is just because of the hardware and the developers either designed the game to skip frames or tied things to the framerate. Sonic Adventure 2 comes to mind where the whole game is tied to its 60fps framerate cap and slows down as the franerate dips.
Your example doesnt seem to be an intentional part of the game design. Merely a beneficial, yet unintended, side-effect of having the console drawing a lot of sprites. An example I can think of is Konami's Gradius III port on SNES. The other releases of the same game did not exhibit the same slowdown in the same places, which makes it clear that the game was not designed to slow down. It certainly made it easier for players to navigate the bullet ridden screen, but it was not an intentional part of the design. Likewise with the PC-98 Touhou games, the slowdown only occurred on systems with particularly weak specs, but not on systems with stronger specs and more RAM than the minimum. Another World/Out of this World is yet another example.
It was common practice in those days to tie game logic to frame rate, simply because it was easier. Dynamic framerate games were incredibly rare. They would optimize the game for the hardware, ensuring it ran as best it could. Some developers did a better job than others at this. Which is why some games that run at below expected framerate run the game logic slower as well.