Is my only option to overlock?
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Playing 'Wipeout XL' on PSX is the crown-jewel of my retropie build (pi4 4GB), and the 'enhanced graphics' NEON option of the PCSX-ReArmed CORE makes the game look great. However, performance struggles at times (slow-downs). Is my only option for a smoother experience to over-clock my pi4?
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@earthprime Have you tried the PSP game? That looks pretty good.
By all means, try an over-clock on this PSX issue. No real harm in trying unless you go nuts.
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@earthprime I think the answer to it depends. Does the game run smooth without the enhanced graphics? If so, overclocking might help. If not, it might just be that the game has that slowdown from the get go - maybe trying a different region version will help (if there is one)?
If you can share more details of when you notice the slowdowns happening (is it related to audio changing music tracks, specific in-game events such as crashing, etc) that might help narrow it down.
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@earthprime did you try with the speed hack? please check the docs: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Playstation-1/#video-double-internal-resolution
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I'm also using the 'Speed Hack'.
The game appears to 'slow-down' at the same places, with and without the 'enhanced' CORE features enabled. Its usually when the game is trying to display too many things at once. The easiest way to demonstrate this is with the first game 'Wipeout' - the first level begins with the racers staged, and a 3-2-1- count-down. There's a performance drop during this sequence, when the racer jumps a gap (mid-stage), and when the racer enters a tunnel and emerges on the other-end back into the open level.
I experimented with an Odroid N2+ and the same sections ran smooth as butter, but the Odroid uses a 64-bit architecture, and the PCSX Re-Armed CORE only works on 32-bit architectures, so my only option is to use the pi4. I'll do a quick test by changing the CORE's 'region' to see if that helps with the performance.
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@earthprime you could try raising the psx cpu core clock and see if that helps.
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@dankcushions Changing the Region to PAL seemed to initially help, and the same areas of slow-down didn't occur. However, the 3rd racing level "Terramax" seemed to work at first, but then slow-down set in, as if a buffer was filling up. I modified the PSX clock speed to its max (100) but this didn't seem to improve performance. The game natively tries to render 30 fps if I recall. I'll need to keep testing.
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@earthprime My usual question is: did you disable vibration, and does it change anything?
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@pjft With vibration disabled, and without modifying any other settings (PSX clock still at 57), this seems to work by using PAL. At first it seemed to still slow-down, but I can't re-create with repeat testing. The base game (no graphic enhancements) also now works great using PAL. I'm going to do more testing with the other Wipeout game (wipeout XL).
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@earthprime note that PAL will typically run at 25fps if the NTSC game is 30fps, which may mitigate any visible slowdown, but probably isn't an ideal solution.
a verbose log would be useful, so we can see if you have anything else that could cause issues.
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@earthprime To be fair, there is a long-standing issue with vibration and some controllers, in that it causes a "stutter" every time the game should vibrate. You can either disable vibration in-game or in the RetroArch menu (that's why I added that option there) if you suffer from it.
If that was what was plaguing you, glad it helped.
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