RetroPie x86 Emulator sub-second pauses not seen in Pi4

[borland502]

RetroPie 4.6.8 - X86_64

I've tried two emulators that work amazingly well on the Pi4, lr-picodrive and pscx-rearmed. The latter (rearmed) I might expect a glitch or two, but a sega32x game also exhibits an odd sub-second pause when playing on a PC. Edit: PSP as well.

While the laptop is not a speed demon, I'm puzzled at the buttery smooth performance on a recent retro pi - Pi 4b build vs the PC. The task manager doesn't indicate any heavy activity either. I'll be trying other games of course but I wanted to see if any bells went off in the reader's head.

CPU: Topology: Dual Core model: Intel Core i5-6300U bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Skylake
rev: 3 L2 cache: 3072 KiB
Intel Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] vendor: Dell driver: i915

Mint v20

https://termbin.com/qqt2

[mitu]

You can try disabling/pausing PulseAudio and see if it makes a difference. You can also toggle - in the runcommand configuration - the performance scheduler for the CPU.

[borland502]

@mitu Thanks! I think I isolated the issue though: The refresh rate. I'm not sure why, but with the Pi and the same 32" LG monitor -- smooth at 60hz. When I adjusted the monitor to 50hz and set libretro to match the 2048 sample deviance went down dramatically in all the impacted emus. But I also tweaked a bit too much to be certain that's entirely it -- but that's what it seems to be thus far.

If my fix is a red herring I'll give your advice a whirl too. Thanks for another triage tip!