Is there a tutorial or guide to the various drivers and video/audio settings?

Zathura

I'm not very literate with this stuff, and can't seem to find a guide to what the various settings change.

For the most part, I can leave everything on the default settings and it's fine, but for things like the NDS emulator, or one particular 3D game (think starfox graphics) for MAME, I'm trying to squeeze a little better performance out of them to reduce slowdown and stop the audio from stuttering / crackling. This usually results in me just tweaking things at random, checking it, reverting to the default, and trying something else, lol.

A list of the options, along with a brief description of what they do and perhaps a hypothetical example would be perfect, if such a thing exists.

caver01

@zathura First of all, click the Docs link at the top of this page and you can read a guide all about setting up RetroPie. Beyond that, you are not provided much detail at all about your configuration. For example, did you READ THIS which you are supposed to do before posting a question here?

You are not even telling us what kind of computer you are running, how you installed the software, what EXACT emulator you are using. Are you using a Raspberry Pi? Because I can't even tell by your post. You see my point? You mention MAME, but do you know how many different MAME emulators you could be using? We would need more details to give you more details. What is the NDS emulator?

Finally, I don't think you will ever get any answer with "all of the options" as there are simply too many possibilities, and we don't know anything about your setup. You must see by now how your post cannot possibly be answered without us making a LOT of assumptions. Nobody wants to give an answer to something so vague, as there is a very good chance of getting that answer wrong. That's why we request that you provide so much detail.

That said, I appreciate the fact that you are not very literate with this stuff. It's a great forum and fun challenge to get a RetroPie setup working. Just know that by the time you are done, if you stick to it, you will have to become very literate. We all have different configurations, and chances are high that none of us is running a system the way you want to run yours. In other words, one size almost NEVER fits all. Yet, that is what is so fun about this--we all have different ideas of what we are building and what we want to get out of it. At some point, please share the details about what you are building so we can enjoy the process of learning together.

Zathura

@caver01

Sorry I wasn't more clear. Yes, I'm running Retropie on a raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

However, I'm NOT asking for help specific to certain games or emulators, I only used those as an example. I'm looking for a guide to the retroarch options and definitions of what the various options do (like what are the different video drivers and how do they affect performance? Same with audio drivers. What is Hard GPU Synch? What is Threaded Video? What is the Latency option under the Audio tab?)

All I'm asking is....Is there a guide to -these- types of settings that I'm missing? I'll take another look at the basic tutorials for setting up retropie, but I don't remember them touching on anything but the most basic things (screen resolution, bilinear filtering, etc.)

markwkidd

These docs may be relevant: