Drastic Slowdown on Pi 4: Reasonable?

StonedEdge

Hi guys,

I’ve been enjoying my CM4 (2GB RAM model) hooked up to HDMI out to play various titles, but one I haven’t really been thrilled with at the moment is NDS via Drastic. I’m 100% sure that it’s something in my configuration settings, however when playing Pokémon Diamond, video output is extremely slow and it’s not running at 100% full speed (seems to be skipping frames). Dropping the frame skip to anything below 4 makes it unplayable. I’m running latest version of RetroPie and have upgraded to the latest version of the kernel. Currently I’m outputting 1920 x 1080 60hz out of HDMI1.

I have a few questions relating to NDS on the Pi 4:

Should I expect 100% full speed from Drastic on the CM4 or is a few skipped frames to be expected?
Do I need to/can I adjust any settings in configuration file etc to get full speed? Do I need BIOS files?
Does level of RAM affect the speed of NDS emulation? Would it be worth upgrading to a 4GB or even 8GB model for extra performance?

Thanks! I did notice this issue below, not sure if it still is a fix for the lag or not. Would appreciate if someone could confirm that for me.

Please note that I installed the latest version of drastic from a pre-compiled binary from the RetroPie setup menu.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/24689/frameskip-issues-on-pi4/2

StonedEdge

An update - I did just try flashing a fresh card with nothing on it and it runs at full speed, so definitely not the Pi or RAM issue. I've uploaded a video here that hopefully shows what's going on. As you can see, the first percentage is 100%+ but the second one shows that not 100% of frames are being rendered, basically it's trying its hardest, but seems like things are being throttled back.