Poor NES emulation speed on Pi3 / Retropie 4.0.2

laephis · 30 Oct 2016, 02:24

I've been struggling with this all day and about to pull my hair out. For some reason the performance in fceumm and nestopia is slow and causing the audio to stutter. For example, fps will dip into the 56/57 range on Castlevania and makes it sound pretty bad. I've experimented with just about every setting: audio, video, vsync, render resolutions, turning off all shaders, etc. Had stock Pi3 settings and also overclocked just for laughs. All the other cores are running at a great 60fps (SNES, GBA, PSX.) On a whim I installed the quicknes emulator and it does run at a solid 60fps, but has tons of other glitches that make it unusable.

The hardware really should have no problem with NES emulation so I'm totally confused why this is giving me such a hard time. Maybe I'm missing something obvious? Any help is appreciated.

meleu · 30 Oct 2016, 05:20

@laephis I can play any NES game on my raspi1 smoothly with lr-fceumm. Indeed, it shouldn't be slow on raspi3. Can you paste these files in pastebin.com:
/opt/retropie/configs/nes/retroarch.cfg
/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg

edit: I use lr-fceumm on my raspi1 (the default NES core).

laephis · 30 Oct 2016, 05:56

@meleu

Certainly, here you go:

all/retroarch.cfg: http://pastebin.com/sU2g9FTL
nes/retroarch.cfg: http://pastebin.com/wEMgTv9c

Thanks!

lostless · 30 Oct 2016, 06:40

@laephis i just played to level 3 on castlevania, using Nestopia, not a single bit of slowdown on my pi3.

Brunnis · 30 Oct 2016, 11:56

You have video_frame_delay = 10 in your nes retroarch.cfg. That's probably the source of your issues. I wouldn't use frame delay on any Pi with any emulator, as it's simply too slow to be worth it. So, set frame delay to 0 and everything should be fine!

laephis · 30 Oct 2016, 13:48

@Brunnis

Brilliant, thank you! I have no idea why that was ever set to 10 and had no idea it would have such a large performance hit. Everything is running perfectly now.

twd · 30 Oct 2016, 14:04

@laephis I had a issue were my tv would only use pal 50hz even when I ran a usa nes rom .... Hence I had stuttering and slowdown try a pal game see if that runs fine if so that's your issue. I had to change the .config to force my tv to find 60hz maybe this is the same issue.

^^^^^ issue solved I speak through my hoop