Artificial Slowdown

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hi all,

I’ve noticed what I believe to be artificial slowdowns on some cores (Parallel using Angrylion and Flycast are the main culprits) where the fps counter sometimes dips down into the 40’s or 50’s during gameplay and the estimated screen framerate also dips down accordingly.

I seem to be able to bypass this by either turning off Audio Synchronization (which then locks the frame rate to 60 at the cost of audio crackling) or by pressing the fast forward button (which usually results in the frame rate going way past 60).

By the fact that both these options produce higher framerates (moreso in the case of Flycast, I’m aware that Angrylion is very resource heavy), I feel I have overhead for my computer to not to be at its limits and that leads to me to believe it may be a configuration issue. I’ve tried lots of options regarding Vsync (including messing with the Nvidia Control Panel Vsync option) to no avail.

This is on Windows 10 everything up to date, using the GLCore driver (seems to happen on GL and Vulkan as well).

Any ideas?

#2

Are your DC and N64 cores set to original framerate or fullspeed? I haven’t played around with DC too much but, as far as i can tell, Parallel will run games at the low FPS that N64 games actually ran at on real hardware unless you set it to fullspeed.

#3

good emulators will emulate the slowdowns of the real hardware. you should give some examples but it sounds like you are describing accurate emulation. some cores may have an option to ‘overclock’ the emulated CPU to mitigate such slowdown.

#4

Are you talking about 60hz or 60fps?

Usually emulators report you 60hz, which means a game runs full speed on a 60hz display. However, very few N64 games run at 60fps. 99% of them will run somewhere between 20 and 30. Which is their normal full speed.

You can somewhat increase the game performance beyond what the N64 can do by enabling any overclocking options and setting the “Counter per OP” option to “1”. This will reduce or normalize most native slowdowns but it won’t make games that have locked frame rates any faster. Zelda will run at 20fps no matter what you do, unless you use some mod or cheat.

#5

Hi all, I’m referring to Retroarch’s FPS counter dropping below 60 which I believe refers to the “system” FPS and so should be locked at the screen refresh unless the system can’t keep up. I’m fully aware that most emulators slow down where the original games would.