Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?

dankcushions

@sirhenrythe5th said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

But what i am missing much more: where are the reports about perfomance with all the games and emulators we were waiting for for so long?
I expected that after retropie is released the forum would be full of threads like "WOW - N64: everything runs now without issues and 60fps" - but there are only some words here and then, but no real experience report that points out the plus of the new Pi concerning retrogaming.

my experience with retropie is that peoples base expectation is that everything should be fullspeed. we never(?) get messages praising the full speed of all the 8-16-bit era consoles, for example.

What about PSP? Does it run perfect now? 60fps even with RidgeRacer and GoW?

i don't know about perfect - i haven't played those games and Wipeout Pure/Pulse have a few dropped frames. however it's close enough that i fancy they could be solved by configuration/overclock/optimization.

What about MAME and FBNeo? Do Games, that needed more perfomance on the Pi3, (STV, PGM2, …) now run with full speed?

MAME covers too wide a catalogue - much of it we can never reasonably expect to run full speed on much better hardware than SBCs. i haven't tried your games.

i'm more interested in progressing our MAME version to more recent ones. current MAME runs reasonably well in our early experiments.

What about PSX? Does it run now with full speed? That would be great, why does no one write about it?

psx has run fullspeed since pi2 - can you name a game that doesn't? tekken 3 dropping frames is more of an emulation one IMO, as the core and ARM pathway is inaccurate. CPU usage is not maxed out in that scenario. the more accurate beetle-psx is very close to being viable on pi4, so that's my focus.

I tested it with my Pi3 (non-overclocked, lr-PSX_rearmed with default Settings) and: yes, i have between 45-55 fps when i activate the display of the framerate.
Sure, it feels full speed and is playable!!!, but i dont have 60fps with my Pi3 :/

can you give an example game? are you running shaders/non-stock settings? that's not correct behaviour for standard retropie on pi3 - it should do psx very easily.

So...are you totally stunned by this beast of Pi4, or do you say "it´s ok....i expected more to be honest".

i'm not stunned as such - GLES 3.x is a great improvement but it only puts on a similar level as some other SBCs that many emulators have already been targeting for years, so it's not revolution. however, the idea of optimizing for new hardware is exciting to me, and we're still not close to done there :)

barbudreadmon

@sirhenrythe5th My understanding of the pi4 is that the cpu is a big step forward, especially since you can OC it to ~2Ghz as long as you cool it properly, however the gpu is a whole other story : on the paper it's certainly more powerful than the previous one, however it still seems to lack speed for several 3D emulators (flycast, yabasanshiro, ...) and the drivers still need some debugging (see topic on yabasanshiro). The odroid N2, sold at 60$ at release (~6 months prior to pi4 release), was a better buy (more power, less issues : as a matter of fact you can play flycast/yabasanshiro at increased resolution without any glitch/slowdown), too bad its price increased that much.

sirhenrythe5th

my experience with retropie is that peoples base expectation is that everything should be fullspeed. we never(?) get messages praising the full speed of all the 8-16-bit era consoles, for example.

I see. If there is a problem: open a thread.
If everything is fine: enjoy in silence.
Makes sense, you are right that i wont find direct comparsions here.

i don't know about perfect - i haven't played those games and Wipeout Pure/Pulse have a few dropped frames. however it's close enough that i fancy they could be solved by configuration/overclock/optimization.<

This is of course my own cup of tea(!!!), but i dont like overclocking. Stock performance only for SirHenry :)
But if further optimizations do their job to get PSP even better - fine!

MAME covers too wide a catalogue - much of it we can never reasonably expect to run full speed on much better hardware than SBCs. i haven't tried your games.

i'm more interested in progressing our MAME version to more recent ones. current MAME runs reasonably well in our early experiments.

This is something i am very interested in as i am a die hard MAME-Fan since the 90s.
Great, looking foward for new ports/versions, thank you for spending so much time with it.
Dont get me wrong: i am very happy with all the arcade games i allready got running on my Pi3B+ using my combination of AdvanceMame and FB Neo, both great projects!
There are some games that would be nice if they would be playable on a Pi too, like the newer Cave-Games or STV and so on - but i can also live without them in the end...MAME started with a hand full of games, no we are talking about thousands. I allready have enough for a lifetime :)

psx has run fullspeed since pi2 - can you name a game that doesn't? tekken 3 dropping frames is more of an emulation one IMO, as the core and ARM pathway is inaccurate. CPU usage is not maxed out in that scenario. the more accurate beetle-psx is very close to being viable on pi4, so that's my focus.> >
can you give an example game? are you running shaders/non-stock settings? that's not correct behaviour for standard retropie on pi3 - it should do psx very easily.<

I dont use shaders as i hooked my Pi to a CRT and dont need further picture-processing.
And i did not change anything in the Setup but the input configuration / controller mapping which should not harm the general performance.
The game i tried for this experiment was one of those HEISE showed in their initial Pi4-Video: "Crash Team Racing".
On their screen 60fps were displayed and everything was sooooooo smooth and fast, i dont have this stable speed on my setup.
But also here: i am happy with PSX, the games are of course playable very good with 40+ fps!!!
I did not know that it was not at 60fps until i saw this video, i never had a PSX in real life.
I was just wondering if i get also this smooth gameplay with a Pi4.
At least with fast 3D like Racing-Games etc, "Castlevania SotN" will have no difference Pi3->Pi4 i suggest.

i'm not stunned as such - GLES 3.x is a great improvement but it only puts on a similar level as some other SBCs that many emulators have already been targeting for years, so it's not revolution. however, the idea of optimizing for new hardware is exciting to me, and we're still not close to done there :)

Thank you very much for your answer dankcushions!!!

AdamBeGood

@sirhenrythe5th It is far from perfect, but I do play Deathsmiles sometimes. Audio stutters quite a lot but I find it good enough to play (although of course it irritates me still)!

Clyde

@sirhenrythe5th said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

This is of course my own cup of tea(!!!), but i dont like overclocking. Stock performance only for SirHenry :)

Same here. 🙂 Even if overclocking won't really hurt the Pi 4 or limit its livespan noticeably with proper cooling, I like to leave it the way it is. That said, I tested overclocking up to 1.75 Ghz in a passively cooled Argon NEO case, but I dropped it back down to standard when I didn't notice much improvement in PSX and N64 games.

So why did I buy the Pi 4? 1. Because I could. 😉 2. My hope that it would run PSX games smoothly without any overclocking or optimizing already came true. 3. I hope that some arcade games which had lag on the Pi 3B will run better on the Pi 4 (with mame2003-plus and FB Neo). 4. Updating from source should also be quicker.

As for the title's question: Do I feel awe? Not really. Am I still happy with my Pi 4 after a month of testing? Absolutely. 😀 And my old Pi 3B will probably become a Pi-Hole for my LAN.

George Spiggott

Overclocking your CPU won't benefit N64 games. PSX games will only benefit if you are running them with the dynarec turned off. Crash Team Racing is the only game I own that needs this.

We clearly haven't reached the full potential of the Pi 4 yet, with at least half a dozen emulators expected to gain from assorted tweaks and GPU driver upgrades.

VictimRLSH

If you want to see the full potential of the Pi 4, check out some of the awesome things Pi Labs are doing on their YouTube channel.

sirhenrythe5th

@VictimRLSH i am pretty sure that you can do a lot of things with this little beast!!!
But in the end i am interested in emulation-performance only :)
I dont care if the PI4-CPU is able to calculate complex fractals within nano-seconds - "Mario Sunshine" in full speed would make my day :D

Darksavior

@sirhenrythe5th Get a used wii with gc support. It's cheaper than a pi with power supply..

YFZdude

@Darksavior said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

@sirhenrythe5th Get a used wii with gc support. It's cheaper than a pi with power supply..

This. I could kick myself for something I did a while back. My Wii quit spinning / reading optical discs. At the time I had already gotten rid of my gamecube since the Wii could play the GC games. So I bought a WiiU and threw out the Wii. I hadn't gotten into retro emulation and then discovered I could have homebrewed it and kept it around afterall.

George Spiggott

@quicksilver said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

Certainly entitled to your opinion, but the pi 4 is the biggest leap forward in power so far in the history of the raspberry. The GPU is twice as powerful as previous models and the CPU from what I understand is 2-4 times as powerful.

I've heard similar about the CPU but is that really the case with the GPU? As I understand it the GPU is very similar to the previous GPU but with a higher clock speed and access to more advanced interfaces (OpenGL 3+ and Vulcan). I'd be really interested in seeing some benchmarks and such for these things especially regarding speed improvements that the newer interfaces bring.

It may well be 2x faster, I really don't know but I'd be interested to see either way.

That brings me to my only real concern with the Pi 4. It's been out for almost a year now and the GPU drivers are still not complete. That's ok and I understand these things take time, but are we likely to have to wait as long when/if the next Pi with an upgraded GPU is released? Is the work being done on the GPU driver now potential groundwork for a future Pi 5/6/7 GPU or will the cycle begin again?

I suppose the bottlenecks in current emulation, both stable like N64 and PSP but also experimental like Gamecube or PlayStation 2) will drive what the emulation scene desires in a Pi "5". This of course may not be route that the Pi evolves in.

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

@quicksilver said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

Certainly entitled to your opinion, but the pi 4 is the biggest leap forward in power so far in the history of the raspberry. The GPU is twice as powerful as previous models and the CPU from what I understand is 2-4 times as powerful.

I've heard similar about the CPU but is that really the case with the GPU? As I understand it the GPU is very similar to the previous GPU but with a higher clock speed and access to more advanced interfaces (OpenGL 3+ and Vulcan). I'd be really interested in seeing some benchmarks and such for these things especially regarding speed improvements that the newer interfaces bring.

It is not the same GPU as used on prior models. In fact its the first pi to use a different one. Eben Upton stated the VC6 is at least twice as powerful as the VC4 GPU. If you wanted a link to the quote Id have to dig around for it ;P

That brings me to my only real concern with the Pi 4. It's been out for almost a year now and the GPU drivers are still not complete. That's ok and I understand these things take time, but are we likely to have to wait as long when/if the next Pi with an upgraded GPU is released? Is the work being done on the GPU driver now potential groundwork for a future Pi 5/6/7 GPU or will the cycle begin again?

They said that the Pi 4 was not originally due to be released in 2019 but in 2020. They said that basically the stars aligned and production was very swift. So instead of sit on them for a year while they were working on the drivers and such they figured might as well get them out there so people can start playing with them. Again I dont have an exact quote to reference for you but I read this on the RPI forums by one of the developers/engineers.

dankcushions

@George-Spiggott said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

That brings me to my only real concern with the Pi 4. It's been out for almost a year now and the GPU drivers are still not complete.

define "complete"? the pi4 was released as a GLES 3.0 part and it had that. there were some bugs with the video output, certainly, but those are essentially fixed/minor now. the additional developments to the driver should be considered a bonus, because weren't sold a vulkan device.

Is the work being done on the GPU driver now potential groundwork for a future Pi 5/6/7 GPU or will the cycle begin again?

i think that depends on what GPU the pi 5+ would have. i think it's early days to even hypothesize.

George Spiggott

I feel this is a bit of a tangent, quicksilver's response about the hardware essentially being released early clarifies the situation enough for me. I do agree that it may be a little early to usefully hypothesise.

Crush

I was excited about PSP and Dreamcast and was definitely not disappointed.
But i also was excited about performance improvements on DOS games., but instead found DOSBOX to run even the simplest DOS games terribly.
In addition some of the arcade games that ran slow on RPI3 run perfect on RPI4.
So overall i'm very happy with the RPI4.

VictimRLSH

@Crush said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

I was excited about PSP and Dreamcast and was definitely not disappointed.
But i also was excited about performance improvements on DOS games., but instead found DOSBOX to run even the simplest DOS games terribly.
In addition some of the arcade games that ran slow on RPI3 run perfect on RPI4.
So overall i'm very happy with the RPI4.

Erghiez and StarBlade now run perfectly on the Pi 4 and they were unplayable on the 3. My laptop bricked recently and I have found the Rasbian Buster desktop adequate for daily use as a PC.

quicksilver

@Crush said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

But i also was excited about performance improvements on DOS games., but instead found DOSBOX to run even the simplest DOS games terribly.

Had the same issue. See my post here https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/25178/dosbox-on-pi-4-game-window-is-fullscreen-but-not-centered-on-screen/42 dosbox is running fantastic for me now.

Clyde

@Crush said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

In addition some of the arcade games that ran slow on RPI3 run perfect on RPI4.

Do you have some examples? I would very much like to test some of those on my Pi 4.

Clyde

@VictimRLSH said in Pi4 and Retropie - awesome...or did you expect more?:

Erghiez and StarBlade now run perfectly on the Pi 4 and they were unplayable on the 3.

Oh yes, StarBlade … one of the games which I absolutely adored in the few arcades that had one here in Germany. I just tested it and you're right, its as soft as butter on my non-overclocked Pi 4. 🤩

Darksavior

I forgot to mention that psx beetle is ~fullspeed for 2d games on an overclocked pi4 at ~1.9Ghz or higher. This emulator is much better than pcsx, and I can now play copy protected/anti-mod japanese games like Card Captor Sakura Tetris and some Goemon game. They both do not work in pcsx. Well, CCST will boot with a cheat file, but that's annoying to use.