Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?

roslof

@AdamBeGood sounds like you're downloading to a PC, then uploading to the pi? You could put it in your pi home drive, where you should have permission to save. Something like /home/pi/Downloads

Then you could open a console window and move it to the correct location.

sudo mv /home/pi/Downloads/mamearcade2016_libretro.so /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-mame2016/

pjft

@roslof help me out here - running from the lr-mame binary I get segmentation faults on both ddp3 and ddpdojt . Am I missing something?

roslof

@pjft said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

@roslof help me out here - running from the lr-mame binary I get segmentation faults on both ddp3 and ddpdojt . Am I missing something?

Launch ddp3 with verbose logging enabled. Copy /dev/shm/runcommand.log output to pastebin.com and post link here.

AdamBeGood

@roslof That works perfectly! But my Overclock setting still isn't saving.... Do I need to change it within the config rather than within the game?

roslof

@AdamBeGood said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

@roslof That works perfectly! But my Overclock setting still isn't saving.... Do I need to change it within the config rather than within the game?

Change it from the Core Options. Not from the MAME Tab slider options.

How: While running the game, with your game controller, hold your hotkey, and whatever button you mapped to "X" to enter RetroArch menu. Then scroll down to Options. Change CPU in there. THEN scroll to the top of the Options menu and Create a game configuration, so the CPU change only saves for the game you are running.

AdamBeGood

@roslof Clever stuff! Yep, that works. Thank you!

pjft

@roslof Nevermind. Nothing that reinstalling the binary didn't fix - interesting.

Thanks.

barbudreadmon

@pjft i've no rights on the mame2016 repo, but i notified the people who have about your PR

pjft

@barbudreadmon Thank you so much for the comment there and for the feedback here!

pjft

The PR was just accepted, so you may all just update lr-mame2016 from source and it should have the option.

Thanks @barbudreadmon for the help there, and everyone else here for testing. I look forward to hearing about preferred underclock options for the different games :)

roslof

@pjft congratulations! A worthy upgrade.

Darksavior

@AdamBeGood MIght be a combination of max swapchain images = 4 and audio latency =256

pjft

To close off this thread - at least until there are more recommendations for actual underclock settings, here are the results of my testing on DoDonPachi Dai-Fukkatsu and Deathsmiles.

I tested running two loops of their attract mode for both, and here are the results:

Deathsmiles
--------
Overclock set to 100%:
[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 14467, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 96.09% (240 seconds)

Overclock set to 42%:
[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 15256, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 99.63% (253 seconds)

-----------
DDPDFK

Overclock set to 100%: 
[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 13376, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 94.03% (222 seconds)

[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 13398, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 94.42% (222 seconds)


Overclock set to 40%:
[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 14502, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 98.18% (241 seconds)


Overclock set to 37%: 
[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 14837, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 98.64% (246 seconds)

[INFO] Threaded video stats: Frames pushed: 14827, Frames dropped: 0.
Average speed: 98.59% (246 seconds)

So, overall, the underclocked runs do seem to have a higher average speed (as expected, but also helps confirm that the changes are doing something, as well as that the underclocked version takes longer (human time) to get to the same place in the emulation - Deathsmiles averages 99.6% speed at 42% Overclock (vs 96.1% at the original clock speed), but takes 13 seconds longer to run the two attract mode loops. DoDonPachi Dai-Fukkatsu takes 24 more seconds, and averages 98.6% speed at 37% Overclock (up from ~94.2% at the original clock speed).

Have fun.

AdamBeGood

@pjft Superb work, glad it was approved. That was quick!

Thanks to @roslof also!

Darksavior

@pjft Did you mess with blitter delay and see if that does anything? I stumbled onto old posts that it might, but I don't know what combo to use with the underclocking of the cpu.

pjft

@Darksavior I didn't this time around. I had tried it a few months back I believe, but for some reason never found anything that was truly deterministic in the few places I found those references. I might just have had bad luck, though, so if you can get something out of blitter delay let me know, would love to get some of these working even better.

I think I might have gone for Ibara and since the performance was already terrible I didn't feel much of a change, but I don't remember.

Edit: can you confirm what your Blitter delay is set to, by the way?

Darksavior

@pjft The default blitter delay is 50%. I haven't tried testing different combos.

roslof

First non-Cave game I played with:

1 on 1 Government (odd basketball Game)
On OC Pi4B 2000C/750G. Default ~50FPS
Set Main CPU Overclock to 55: New 60FPS

No perceived degradation in gameplay speed.
Winning.

barbudreadmon

@roslof said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

No perceived degradation in gameplay speed.

There are tons of games that'll benefit from underclocking without ruining gameplay, the reason being that the game doesn't make full use of the cpu in the first place. The same applies to FBNeo's cpu clock core option.

pjft

@Darksavior Thanks. So is mine. Just checking whether it would have saved that option from previous testing attempts.