Pi3B+ and shaders

[VanZan]

I have an old RetroPie theme that I'm sentimental over. Unfortunately it only works with RetroPie 4.4 and a Pi3B+. Which is fine since I only need to emulate Sega Mega Drive/Genesis stuff (it's a theme for that).

I was tinkering with it last night and when I had an overlay and shader (crt-pi-curvature) there was a noticeable amount of slowdown. When I disabled the shader there was no slowdown.

Is slowdown to be expected in such a situation? I thought a Pi3B+ would be powerful enough with shaders when emulating something light such as Genesis. Although I suppose genesis_plus_gx is demanding enough.

I'm just wondering if it's normal for slowdown to be occurring or perhaps I have something configured incorrectly.

Thanks for any help!

[mitu]

I have an old RetroPie theme that I'm sentimental over. Unfortunately it only works with RetroPie 4.4 and a Pi3B+

I don't think there have been any breaking changes in EmulationStation w.r.t. theming so that it would work on recent versions. What is the name of the theme ?

I'm just wondering if it's normal for slowdown to be occurring or perhaps I have something configured incorrectly.

It depends on the shader, but a slowdown can be expected, especially when the emulation is also demanding (i.e. GenesisPlus-GX). Try the zfast-pi shader, it should perform better.

[VanZan]

@mitu Forgot about this! Thanks for the reply! You're right the theme works fine with RetroPie 4.8 on the download page. I read that the theme would break....I don't dare update 4.8 though! (I may DD it beforehand and then try!).

Since you asked which theme it is (but it might be a little sketchy):

I certainly don't expect any support here for it.

Also when I installed 4.8 the slowdown when using shaders is much reduced and actually tolerable now. Happy days!

Next item on the agenda is to read up on overclocking the Pi3B+ because I wouldn't mind having run-ahead enabled.

Cheers mate!