Libretro emulators running horribly

[Kalamabrew]

Hello all, I hope you can help me with a bit of a situation.

I recently installed debian on an intel nuc, as well as retropie. Any and every rom opened via a libretro emulator stutters horribly, both audio and video, and only appears in a small window in the upper left hand of the screen. It is only those emulators as opening mupen64plus runs N64 games very smoothly, I switch to lr-mupen64 and it is right back to stutter city.

I've tried changing configs for video in retroarch as well as configuration editor and not only has none of that helped, it has done literally NOTHING. I even tried adding scanlines just to test that out and that didn't even show up in game. I could get retroarch to switch to fullscreen mode and saved changes before exit, and it is also set to save on exit, but it just reverts directly back to whatever it was set to before.

Intel nuc i3-6400u plugged into samsung 4k television.

[mitu]

@Kalamabrew My guess is that you don't have proper/accelerated OpenGL support in your installation. Scanlines (a.k.a. Shaders) don't work unless you're using the gl video driver, the fact that you're not seeing them seems to indicate your video driver is not gl.
Can you run a Libretro emulator with verbose logging enabled - using the Runcommand launch menu, then get the log RetroArch log file (/dev/shm/runcommand.log) and put it on pastebin.com to take a look ? Do the same for the RetroArch configuration file (/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg).