Bad cracking/stuttering sound in RA with any system or game with Vsync

Hi. I’ve just started getting poor performance in RA with any system (using different cores) and any game. It was running fine but suddenly I’ve started to get this issue. I don’t think I set anything different to cause this (at least on purpose).

My system is more than up for the emulation, so I don’t understand why I need to turn off VSync to get best performance. It’s not a big deal, I can live without VSync, but I’d just like to know if this is / can be normal.

Thanks.

My system spec

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 GTX 1070 8 GB DDR4

Probably power-saving options. Make sure everything is set to ‘max performance’ in both your power/battery settings and your GPU control panel.

Cool thing about RA so many options! But sometimes too many options :slight_smile: That’s a decent machine it should handle it well but here’s some suggestions…

Set audio resampling quality to lowest, or just disable audio syncing (note if you disable audio sync and also disable Vsync the framerate will be unlimited). Set 128ms audio latency. If that works you can later lower it to 64ms or 48ms, or even 32ms or lower on some systems. To begin with you can even disable audio completely in the menu for testing purpose to really isolate the problem to audio and check the framerate…

Try changing audio resampling to Nearest from Sinc, it’s a faster basic method of resampling. If using Nearest I’d also suggest try changing audio output rate to 192000 or 96000, from the default 48000 (show advanced settings must be on or this option is hidden). Higher output rate should give higher quality without any significant performance hit if the soundcard supports the rate. Especially with simple Nearest resampling a higher rate should help give smoother sound. In the config file it’s called “audio_out_rate”. If the soundcard does not support the rate it should be automatically reset to default 48 kHz.

Other than that Enable threaded video. Disable any shaders. Disable Runahead. Set frame delay to 0ms (this gives the computer the most time possible to work on each frame). Try Vulkan video driver if possible. That’s all from the top of my head might be something else but I’d start with those…

Oh and when you’re not sure of what you’ve done you can simply hit the start button on the controller in the menu, that resets the option to the default value!

Since you are noting that these performance hiccups have started only recently and all of a sudden, I think that the cause of these issues might be external to RA itself and purely dependent on other software or your OS.

Have you recently installed any of the following:

  • Windows updates / cumulative packages / build updates;
  • new drivers for your GPU;
  • new drivers for your audio card;
  • new drivers for anything;
  • any application or service working in the background that might be disrupting or interfering with RA?

most of the time, the quickiest fix is to remove existing retroarch.cfg, retroarch-config.cfg and all other overrides and similar config files.

if that does not solve the problem, then probably something with the system its running on. post log if thats the case.

Thanks for all the replies guys, I finally found the answer!

Turned out when I installed the latest Nvidia drivers, it set my refresh rate of my monitor to 50hz, when it was 60hz. RA was set to run at 60hz and the discrepancy was causing the issue. I went through the setup to get RA to run at my monitors refresh rate and it fixed it. However, instead of doing that in the end, I set my monitor back to 60hz and RA to match that again. Job done.

Thank you all so much for helping. :slight_smile:

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