Raspberry PI4 Low FPS (4.6, 260ms) in emulationstation menu

warchant

Hi. I installed latest retropie (4.6.4) on Raspberry PI 4, running Raspbian buster.

$ uname -a
Linux pi.wlan 4.19.118-v7l+ #1311 SMP Mon Apr 27 14:26:42 BST 2020 armv7l GNU/Linux

I run emulationstation in terminal, it opens and shows 4.6 FPS with 200-250ms latency. Same FPS preserved in games (I tried Mario in GBA). This is unplayable.

My /boot/config.txt:

# Enable audio (loads snd_bcm2835)
dtparam=audio=on

[pi4]
# Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver on top of the dispmanx display stack
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
max_framebuffers=2

[all]
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
gpu_mem=256
hdmi_enable_4kp60=0
hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=16

What can I do to run at least 30 FPS, or preferably, 60 FPS?

mitu

Are you running EmulationStation from a desktop session ? What's your current resolution - post the output of tvservice -s .

warchant

Yes, I start lightdm (non-root user), then start emulationstation, also as non-root user.

$ tvservice -s 
state 0xa [HDMI CUSTOM RGB lim 16:9], 3840x2160 @ 30.00Hz, progressive

mitu

This is not a supported or tested configuration - start EmulationStation from a console session at boot - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/FAQ/#where-did-the-desktop-go.

EmulationStation - and the included emulators - will suffer from the 4k resolution that you've set, you should choose 1080p as your default resolution. You seem to have added the configuration options to config.txt, but the desktop session will not take those into account and start with the TV's 'preferred' resolution - in your case it's 4k@30p, which adds the stuttering and slowdown you're noticing.

warchant

Stopped lightdm, started xinit emulationstation and got stable 60 FPS, with 1080p.
Thank you!

mitu

@warchant said in Raspberry PI4 Low FPS (4.6, 260ms) in emulationstation menu:

Stopped lightdm, started xinit emulationstation and got stable 60 FPS, with 1080p.

Still not a supported configuration.

warchant

Where can I see a list of supported configurations?

BuZz

@warchant RetroPie on the RPI is designed to run from the console. Not under X. Don't use xinit.