EmulationStation gamelist seems laggy

ruckage

Thanks for the reply. I'd read that vram caused issues for some people and setting it to 80 helped but I'm using the latest version of ES and 80 seems to be the default vram setting now. Regarding having multiple themes installed I would very much doubt that would have any impact as they wouldn't be loaded, more likely a coincidence in your case. I only have 2 themes on this build at the moment anyway so that definitely isn't a cause.

I'm sure it has to do with loading in metadata from the gamelist.xml and the boxart/preview videos. In basic view which just has the gamelist there is no slowdown, in detailed which displays metadata and boxart the framerate drops to 20fps and occasionally lower, and in video view the frame drops are even more severe dropping down to 12fps at times.
My assumption is that if you just tap down through the list one entry at a time repeatedly it's trying to load the assets for every entry you pass and the pi just can't keep up which makes sense but it's just strange that I don't remember it feeling laggy before.

I may try reducing the filesize of the boxart to see if that helps and perhaps the videos as well.

gaavoid

@ruckage Yeah that's when I've experienced lag; when pressing down (or up) rapidly.
I only started noticing after about 4.2.8. I forget which ES version was running.
This was before I had installed video snaps so was getting lag on just the artwork and metadata.
The only other change I've made is enabling OMX player for video snaps.
(Didn't realise VRAM is now set to 80 as default.)

ruckage

@gaavoid

I'm positive it was the boxart causing the slowdown now, when I first scraped the images I used png as I'm not a fan of the compression artifacts you find in jpg and each image was 200-300KB. I switched to jpg and the the file size is 30-50KB. Now the gamelist is nice and smooth again.

Downside is the jpg from sselph scraper are aggressively compressed and that does sadly ruin them so I may just convert the png myself to get a good middle ground between filesize/image quality.

Hyruleslink

@ruckage Another issue is pixel dimensions of the picture. For example, 400x600 will load faster than 1200x1800. Most of my boxart images are around 300-500kb large and it runs pretty smooth.

HurricaneFan

@ruckage You can reduce the png files to be smaller. Google Tiny PNG. You can just drag and drop images onto the site and it will reduce the image sizes without making them look compressed. Only downside is, you can only do batches of 50 images.

ruckage

@hyruleslink
My image sizes are small in dimensions so that isn't the issue. I've been using retropie for a long while now and one of my first projects I used huge images (file size and dimensions) and experienced no lag so perhaps something has changed.

@hurricanefan said in EmulationStation gamelist seems laggy:

@ruckage You can reduce the png files to be smaller. Google Tiny PNG. You can just drag and drop images onto the site and it will reduce the image sizes without making them look compressed. Only downside is, you can only do batches of 50 images.

Yeah, I know - but thanks anyway. Though I recommend pngoo as thats a desktop app which I prefer (works in the same way though - reduces the image to indexed color while keeping a full alpha channel (if needed). Still lossy but at least the image stays sharp.

asmithau

@ruckage

Hi ruckage, I had a similar issue a month or so back after updating the underlying OS. To test I installed a fresh load of 4.2 on another card, then updated everything except the underlying OS, put the roms / images back and it was like chalk and cheese.

Since then i've avoided updating the OS side and have had no issues.

Not sure is this is related to your issue, but thought I'd let you know.

ruckage

@asmithau
Thanks for the info, not the issue in my case though as I haven't updated the os or retropie - only ES. At least with images with a smaller file size it seems to perform well.

@pjft @jdrassa Is it possible when changes were made to fix the white screen of death that it had an adverse effect on the performance as far as loading the boxart etc. is concerned? Before that did it cache the boxart perhaps?

I have an older version of ES and retropie on an old build I made using large png files so I may see if I can get a performance comparrison.

pjft

@ruckage hi! I had read this yesterday, and really attributed it mostly to the larger images you seemed to be using now. Larger images will take a lot longer to load and render, that's why the ES scraper has by default been set to resize them. I know the quality suffers quite a bit in consequence, alas.

I won't say that there hasn't been any particular change that may have affected this, to be sure, but my initial guy feeling would suggest it's related to the image size.

If you can test your previous builds with the new images, that can certainly be helpful for comparison.

I suppose the other factors can relate to media performance (SD card and/or USB drive performance) and overclocking, but I assume those are not the issue for the time being.

Another thing you could attempt is to, in your new build, install an older ES version (maybe even the one from your old build) on the side and run it to compare.

The binary should be in

/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation

Copy that to a random temporary folder in your new system and run it from there

chmod +x emulationstation 
./emulationstation

And see how it goes. Let us know.

Thanks!

ruckage

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.