Emulationstation 100% Single Thread Usage

theofficialgman

maybe this has to do with audio not working for me within emulation station? The default audio card and master audio device correctly change audio volume but I don't hear any navigation sounds (they are on). before anyone asks, yes audio is working in retroarch and everything else. I've tried manually setting emulationstation to pulse and the Master audio device as well as many other things to no avail
edit: ignore what I have crossed out, I wasn't aware that my theme could affect the audio and my theme has the scroll sound commented out for some reason

pjft

@gmesmer I don't know about the audio, but I was going to report the same experience as @mitu regarding Raspberry OS 64 tests. From the little I recall testing it out back in the day, I don't recall the 100% CPU usage.
If you run ES with the debug flag, is there anything interesting in the logs that keeps getting repeated - perhaps suggestion what's keeping the CPU at max usage?

theofficialgman

@pjft no, nothing in the debug besides expected button input logs

theofficialgman

alright new development
running in forced windowed mode the cpu usage goes down to below 5% (framerate is still a solid 60fps)

theofficialgman

I built emulationstation manually with the GL 1.4 backend to see if there would be any difference and I have the same issue with it.

maybe this very old stackoverflow post still applies here? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21925313/100-cpu-utilization-when-using-vsync-opengl

theofficialgman

@pjft @mitu I found a solution which works well enough in this case
this seems to be a configuration set deliberately with nvidia linux drivers to busywait on vsync

setting this flag changes that behavior __GL_YIELD=USLEEP
cpu usage goes down to 30% (not as good as windowed mode) and the frequency drops significantly as well (settles in around 600mhz)
overall I think this is good enough

pjft

@gmesmer Interesting. Thanks for sharing - it might be helpful for others who try to set it up in this context.

mitu

@gmesmer are you running in windowed mode as fullscreen/borderless ? You might want to try it to see if it yields the same CPU usage.

setting this flag changes that behavior __GL_YIELD=USLEEP

You should test to see how that affects emulation, it might introduce some latency.

theofficialgman

@mitu emulation is unaffected by __GL_YIELD=USLEEP

as for fullscreen/borderless, I've tried both exclusive fullscreen and borderless fullscreen but it seems that the nvidia driver recognizes that only one thing is on display so effectively the borderless is treated as fullscreen.

Full windowed mode (ie: not borderless fullscreen) goes through the compositor and has different results

anyway, I did my research on this, the default settings is to busywait on vsync for most nvidia drivers which pins the cpu to 100% on that core

theofficialgman

also my apologies for the slow replies. even though I think my email notification settings are correct. I have never once gotten an email from this forum