Some games feel stuttery (FBAlpha)?
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@barbudreadmon, thank you for your tips. I don't use any shaders, only overlays such as the art border you see there. The screen area is transparent so the video is just raw/clean.
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@greenhawk84 i just checked, there are actually quite a lot of games that will be affected by the cpu overclock core option :
- NeoGeo (all)
- CPS1 (all)
- CPS2 (all)
- System16 (all)
- Toaplan (all)
- Cave (all)
- Irem (all except oldest m62/m63 boards)
- Psikyo (oldest board only : Gunbird, Battle K-Road, Strikers 1945, Tengai)
- Taito (Taito H and Taito B boards only)
- Some unaffiliated games like "Double Dragon" and "1945k III"
With your setting you are basically asking all those games to double their cpu usage, i don't recommend this on a raspberry, you should probably consider using this only for games that have real speed issues in their original hardware (games like metal slug).
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@barbudreadmon, I originally turned the CPU overclock to 170 to help Metal Slug 2 slowdowns. This was quite some time ago when FBAlpha was performing a lot better on my RPi3 and I never had an issue with other games. I turned it back to 100 per your advice but I still noticed motion jitter. The games are performing at 60fps.
I don't know if I am just sensitive to this issue and others would never notice.
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I found a pretty good way to test this. Run TMNT: Turtles in Time and let it play the "Game Over" screens. There is plenty of motion with the letters going by and the sewer surf level etc. I ran this using Mame2010 and it was very smooth. I switched to FBAlpha and it was clearly stuttering.
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@greenhawk84 Hmmm i have no issue in the "Game Over" screens, everything is smooth for me, including the sewer surf, and i'm generally good at noticing issues that appear for a few miliseconds.
Did you try enabling vsync ?Another thing comes to mind : your overlay (i have no experience with those), perhaps you should disable it temporarily to make sure it is unrelated.
PS : this time i didn't disable my overclocking, i ran with the following settings :
arm_freq=1350
gpu_freq=500
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
over_voltage=5
sdram_over_voltage=2 -
@barbudreadmon it feels like it improved when I turned "threaded" video off. However, when I save core overrides it wont hold.
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Threaded video is definitely changing it for me. Tried the first TMNT and it was really jittery until I turned off threaded video.
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@robotronman I confirm that threaded video is causing this issue in FBA. Why is it when I try to save Vsync to "on" in the Retroarch menu, save core overrides is not activating?
Turn off threaded video and having vsync "on" is making my games in FBA very smooth again.
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Phew boy, I still battle with all the layers of .cfg's and which ones override the others. I saved "core options" (via Retroarch in game menu) in FBA to Vsync "on" but it also saved integer scaling (because I was playing a game I wanted integer ON), now everything in FBA uses integer by default.
Ah well, I guess I finally narrowed it down to threaded video. Not sure if this is supposed to be on by default or if any of you use it on purpose.
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@greenhawk84 I know it was a wild ride through this, but if it is any consolation, I know I messed with the threaded video setting on my previous build while I was trying to improve input lag. Of course, I did a lot of things in addition too, so I wasn't really in a position to zero in on this, but I am fairly confident now that you have narrowed it down that this is also why I saw the same thing in FBA.
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@caver01 I did see a note within the config editor that warned threaded video "may improve performance but introduce stutter" or something close to that statement. I wonder which cases threaded video is useful, perhaps older Pi's needed it to get a leg up.
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If you've modified the
video_max_swapchain_images, it's most likely the problem.Many "low latency" guides suggest setting this setting to 2 in order to reduce latency. Due to quirks in the Broadcom graphics driver, this setting didn't have any effect until special support was implemented in RetroArch, sometime in November-December. You're probably seeing the stutter because you've updated to a newer RetroArch build that now applies this setting correctly. Unfortunately, setting this to 2 introduces stuttering on intensive (16 bit or later) systems.
Set this back to 3 and performance should go back to normal.
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@caver01 @GreenHawk84 Hmm this is still weird that i get no issue with threaded video on, so it's most likely a combination with another setting, perhaps the audio driver since threaded video will create separate video and audio threads ? As mentioned, i use alsa, not alsathread.
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threaded video on has been the retropie default for as long as i can remember. it doesn't cause a stutter in a default retropie setup, at least.
i think @psyke83 is probably on the right lines. maybe one of the 'dangerous tweaks' here have been applied? https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Input-Lag
or a shader?
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@psyke83 I never heard of video_max_swapchain_images, and I have not modified anything there. I can check to see what the value is but I am not sure where to access this. Funny you mention later 16bit games because I believe threaded video is enabled on Genesis/SNES cores and does not cause an issue. I played Sonic and Contra III to confirm stutter on my other cores and saw nothing like FBAlpha. I have to confirm again later when I am home from work.
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@dankcushions would you like any of my files to take a look at and see if anything is out of wack?
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@greenhawk84 sure! what directory are your roms in? that will determine which .cfg file is at play. also we would need to see the /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg
do you have any per-game or per-core overrides set?
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@dankcushions - I use the Arcade, Neo-Geo, Megadrive (Genesis), SNES, and NES folders (I think that's all of them)
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@psyke83 - as of now none of my cores use threaded_video only vsync. I tested Megadrive, NES, and SNES today and the games are very smooth.
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You could potentially have configuration in the system-specific retroarch.cfg that would override what's in the shared configuration. The simplest way to check is to open a game using the FBAlpha core, then check the video settings menu. It's listed as
Max swapchain imagesthere, and needs to be set to 3.
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