Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie

dodonpachi

My experience with the Pi 4 2GB model has been great, and I've gotten hundreds of hours of play time with it. But, there's certain games on MAME I want to play that simply do not run well even with my 2.1 GHz CPU overclock settings.

I'm looking for an alternative SBC to put Retropie on, with a higher CPU clock speed. Something closer to 3.0 GHz. The UDOO Bolt v8 seems promising, but its $400 USD pricing is way too much.

Any ideas?

George Spiggott

@dodonpachi What about a mini PC like a NUC? Depends how much you want to spend.

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott I'd say no more than a little over $200 USD, as long as performance was satisfactory to me. The CHUWI LarkBox Pro seems kinda promising, but I'm hesitant to buy it unless I see how it runs the MAME games in question. (Deathsmiles, Akai Katana, Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu, Soul Calibur, etc)

Plus, what's really important for me is the retropie "experience." Small form factor, easy rom management, sub 20 second boot up, plug a controller and play with no mouse or keyboard at startup, fancy themes, etc.

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

CHUWI LarkBox Pro

My experience with a similar device : it can't keep up with cooling and throttle to 2Ghz after a few seconds of "turbo".

ExarKunIv

@dodonpachi not sure if this is up to speed that you want. but i have had some nice results with my NVIDIA jetson nano 2gb. it has the same chip set as the NVIDIA shield

dodonpachi

@exarkuniv How do the games listed above play on it, if you don't mind me asking? Does the audio drop or stutter much?

ExarKunIv

@dodonpachi that i dont know. not sure if i even have those games. but im more then willing to take a look and get back to you on it

barbudreadmon

@exarkuniv said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

@dodonpachi not sure if this is up to speed that you want. but i have had some nice results with my NVIDIA jetson nano 2gb. it has the same chip set as the NVIDIA shield

It has a 1.4Ghz arm cpu, its only interest would be its gpu if you intend to play hardware-accelerated emulators, otherwise its gonna be slower than a pi4.

ExarKunIv

@barbudreadmon i know. but i have had no problem with anything i have tried yet. even some gamecube games run well on it. i still need to find some xbox games for it so mess around with

barbudreadmon

@exarkuniv OP's request is about MAME, which isn't hardware-rendered, so it's not gonna run faster on a jetson nano.

ExarKunIv

@barbudreadmon sorry not like i know what is and what isnt hardware-rendered when it comes to all of this.

George Spiggott

Here's a video here showing emulation on the Larkbox. PS2 is fairly CPU intensive.

barbudreadmon

@george-spiggott said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

PS2 is fairly CPU intensive.

Yeah, this video confirms my fears : the cpu throttles when something is cpu intensive (see top left)

George Spiggott

@barbudreadmon So the big question is will it throttle for MAME/Soulcalibur? There was a whole thread about running Soulcalibur on the Pi4 a while back. It's almost there in terms of playability on a Pi4. I doubt you need that much more CPU power to get it to run well.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/25148/soul-calibre

There's also stuff like this. I use one of these at work. It's about 8" square which is smaller than the monitor stand that sits on it. Obviously I've never run emulation on it but the one in the video has an Intel i5 7500t and UHD 630 so should be well capable of running any MAME ROMS.

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott I suspect you may be right about needing just a little more CPU, which is why in my first post I was looking for something closer to 3.0 ghz. Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu was absolutely unplayable on Pi 3B+ overclocked to 1.6 ghz, but it's almost there on Pi 4 overclocked to 2.1 ghz. That's a difference of 500 mhz.

Perhaps my understanding of computers is simplified, but I'm willing to guess I'd be successful around the 2.7 ghz mark.

George Spiggott

@dodonpachi Mhz will often be a poor guide to comparing capabilities of CPUs. What you're looking for on an X86 processor is the Single Thread Rating (STR) . The Intel i5 7500T has a rating of 1966 The Larkbox'S CPU has an STR of 1073. My NUC has an STR of 2249 and runs Soulcalibur perfectly. Can anyone with an older processor chime in?

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-7500T+%40+2.70GHz&id=2917

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J4115+%40+1.80GHz&id=3679

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-8259U+%40+2.30GHz&id=3299

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott So it's possible to have a CPU with a lower clock speed in mhz than a Pi 4, but better MAME performance?

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

@george-spiggott So it's possible to have a CPU with a lower clock speed in mhz than a Pi 4, but better MAME performance?

MAME has a few dynarecs running on x86, and iirc one of them is for the sh3 cpu used in cv1k games (there might be some shenanigans to enable it though), so in this specific case i would expect a 2Ghz x86 cpu would do much better than a pi4. There might be other cases were the situation will be reversed (losing a dynarec because you switched from arm to x86).

Folly

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

But, there's certain games on MAME I want to play that simply do not run well even with my 2.1 GHz CPU overclock settings.

Which games ?
Did you try the option -frameskip 10 or -autoframeskip (frameskip status -> F11, change with -> F9)?

dankcushions

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

@george-spiggott So it's possible to have a CPU with a lower clock speed in mhz than a Pi 4, but better MAME performance?

yes, because different CPUs have different instruction sets and 'instructions per clock' (IPC). think of clock speeds like revs of an engine. a v12 is going to do more at 2000rpm than a 50cc motorbike at the same. generally speaking the ARM cpus found in Pis and other SBCs have a lower IPC than x86, so 1MHz of such an ARM processor does less than 1MHz in an x86 processor. even some ancient x86 pentium processors can outperform them.

plus codebases can be optimized better for certain architectures. i expect the bulk of MAME development work is done on x86.