Another issue, after upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 and saving a core wide shader preset when you quit the ROM and open it again or another rom from the same core the preset is not applied (at least is saved) and you need to apply it, also in the update I lost my RetroAchievements settings

Ok, I give up. The request was simple and would give developers early feedback on real world performance with each release, which seems to be of some value, based on the feedback above on rev 4.3. It would also allow newbies to quickly check their setup against a standard benchmark and take away a lot of subjectivity, saving them and the support team countless hours of chasing problems that do not exist.

Good luck,
MML

Thanks @pjft , I think you're right and its a combination of me misremembering and also the larger fontsize on my nes/snes theme amplifying the problem to an extent.

I just checked my Megadrive build which uses a much older version of ES with a Raspberry pi 2 and a slower SD card with my Newgen theme (my new sd wont be running at full speed without overclocking anyway ).
The previews for that build are big in pixel dimensions but I managed to compress them quite well using pngoo so the filesize of each image ranges 100-200kb (originally they were 400-900KB) and even then enabling show FPS I can see the frame rate drop in the same way. I think because the fontsize for the list on that theme is smaller the occasional skipping just isn't as noticeable but is still there.

So basically I'm just noticing something that has been there from the beginning. And for anyone else who has the problem it's easily remedied by making sure you keep the preview image filesize as low as possible.

I did notice one other strange thing regarding framerate but I need to test more. The carousel on my new theme seems to run around 60fps on a rpi3 but occasionally when exiting out from a system the framerate drops to around 45ps and stays at that frame rate until going into another system and backing out again. Obviously doesn't affect things too much but just seemed odd.

@davej Looks like that's it! Turning threaded video on allows for both to coexist without the noticeable slowdown. Strangely enough, I have no recollection of having turned that off. Looking at that other thread you linked it would appear that "on" is the default, right? I will admit to the possibility that I may have switched it off not knowing what it was for, but I don't recall having done so. I'm also now finding that the Threaded Video reverts back to OFF after I exit out of a rom to retroarch, despite selecting to save the core override. When I check the contents of the retroarch.cfg threaded video is set to "true".

Any thoughts on that?

EDIT: After going into the RetroPie Setup It appears that while retroarch.cfg was set to "true", all of the problem emulators were set to "false" (which I believe overrides the retroarch.cfg). Going into them individually and changing them seems to have sorted this out. For anyone else who might be in the same situation, I found these by going to the RetroPie section in Emulation Station and hitting...

RetroPie Setup > Configuration / tools > configedit >advanced configuration>Configure Libretro Options>and then choosing the emulator/retroarch.cfg and turning video_threaded from false to true.

Thanks again for the help!

@muehltime It does nothing on the RPI.

I noticed the same thing when Sbake Man launch those little snakes in Mega Man 3. This is the same on the original hardware.

another thing you can do is change the retroarch video driver to dispmanx which is said to save 1 frame off the input latency. i haven't personally done this as it has some side-effects (no shaders, no OSD, no screen rotate)

@AndersHP said in lag lag lag, I hate it, just ran a lag test and am disappointed with RPi/retropie:

@pjft said in lag lag lag, I hate it, just ran a lag test and am disappointed with RPi/retropie:

@rig I believe all of them can be changed in the RetroArch menu. You do need to save them for turn to be applied when you restart RetroPie, so depending on your setup you may want to go straight to the config files for that after you're happy with the results.

Does this mean that they wont be applied unless you save and restart? Or do they apply instantly but get reset if not saved? Sorry if it's a stupid question.

I believe that the changes are applied immediately but as soon as you exit the game/retroarch you lose the changes unless you save them. You can verify this by making changes, exiting the menu and the reentering the menu and checking to see if your changes are still there.

@chipsnblip I think that's worded very clearly. Thank you!

@Brunnis Wow that was very in-depth, glad there are more educated people than me looking into this kind of stuff. All my tests were done using slow motion iphone video with side by side comparisons, not very accurate in the technical sense. Thanks for the extra info!

I ran into this the other day. After some googling it turns out the default input configuration is for xbox controllers which did't work for me (using 8bitdo).

You need to edit /opt/retropie/emulators/pisnes/snes9x.cfg and manually configure the inputs. You can test your controller to get the right numbers using

jstest /dev/input/js0

To reduce conflicts I set the values for QUIT,ACCEL,QLOAD,QSAVE, and LEFT,RIGHT,UP,DOWN 1 and 2 to numbers around 100.

Edit: Realized I was just parroting the official documentation about it: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/super-nintendo-entertainment-system#pisnes

@dankcushions said in FPS dips in secret of Mana on specific screens. What is causing this?:

@Aksen https://github.com/dborth/snes9xgx/issues/66

if this is the same slowdown your experiencing, it's as per the original game.

ah, okay. I'm not surprised the original game had slowdowns in areas with lots of sprites, but I'm also getting it (along with crackly audio) in the fullscreen menus. If that's in the original game, then my emulation is running fine and I'm happy, but the slowdown in the menus may be a different issue:

0_1485802280431_256px-Secret_of_Mana_-SNES-_New_Game.png

I have the original cart on hand but my snes is packed up somewhere, or else I'd check for myself :-/

@mitu ok thank you

I'm using the build in BT.
Maybe the BT "Module" on your pi is faulty. At least it doesn't sound normal that both controllers don't work correctly via BT.

Quick update:

Managed to make it run a lot smoother using those parameters:

dtoverlay=waveshare35a:rotate=270,swapxy=1,speed=27000000,fps=60.

The higher the speed, the better it displays, but anything above 27000000 f'd up the colors badly for me.
Definitely playable for anyone wanting to use this screen, but it still drops some frames, mainly during cinematics and stuff. Personally, Gonna try out a 5" HDMI screen, don't wanna compromise on the gaming experience too much.

@dsfrancis got my controllers configured. Now I just need to apply my shaders and I'm set.