Mame Current Performance on Pi400

[KingPizza]

I have a Pi400 that's overclocked to 2GHz, and current Mame runs pretty slow in 3d games, especially Street Fighter and Soul Caliber. I'm just using the current version of Retropie and Emulationstation, so no crazy mods or programs or anything.

Does anyone else have experience using current mame with a Pi4 series? How is the performance for you? I assume these games are just too much for the system, but don't want to rule out I might just need to adjust some settings.

If anyone has any suggestions for settings to adjust to try and get better performance that would be appreciated. Or just let me know the Pi4 can't handle current Mame.

[barbudreadmon]

@KingPizza MAME is written with desktop computer in mind, it's not optimized for low-end devices like smartphones or arm boards. Desktop computers from 10+ years ago could probably be compared to a pi4, which is why MAME version from their time are usually a good match for a pi4.
Lots of games will still run ok with MAME on pi4 because their emulation was never very demanding, but those 2 psx-based 3D arcade games aren't in this category.

FWIW, @roslof wrote a pi4 arcade compatibility list, with his recommended emulator for each playable games he found (note that those 2 games don't seem to be listed)

[Floob]

@KingPizza

You can see some benchmarks with MAME (not lr-mame) on the Pi here:
https://stickfreaks.com/misc/raspberry-pi-mame-benchmarks

Ideally, you want a figure higher than "100%", as that average typically doesn't represent the lowest framerate during the run, which tends to be 10-20% lower than the overall average. 200%+ almost certainly guarantees stutter-free play with no frame drops.

soulclbr is definitely one of the slowest there at about 61% with your setup.

And its red on roslofs list:

[Crush]

You're not going to get any good performance on 3D mame games on the Pi.
But for Soul Calibur and all other arcade games that run on a Naomi or Atomiswave board use Flycast.