Beetle PSX HW is significantly slower than Mednafen now

Libretro Cores
#1

I used to use Beetle PSX HW and it worked quite well on my 1.7ghz i5 laptop. I always kept it at 1x resolution using software mode because it was more accurate and the OGL/VLK versions weren’t much faster and seemed to have accuracy issues.

Anyway, it seems I made the mistake of updating too many times and now I’m getting performance issues. I don’t know if it was from updating RetroArch or from updating the core itself (they tend to constantly add new features). Or maybe it’s just from all of NVIDIA’s drivers but I doubt it since the bottleneck is CPU here.

Basically every now and again it gets sluggish, with the sound fluttering/cracking a bit out of nowhere. Tends to happen more frequently when returning from being idle with game running, etc. And this triggers the “slow CD read detected, use precache or w/e” even when not loading (at normal 2x speed). I’ve tried all settings, turned off overclocking etc, vsync, shaders (I tend to run a light crt shader and it doesn’t really impact games). Also rewind was not enabled at all.

No idea if it’s a bug in the core (having these slowdowns that occur at a cyclic rate and trigger that slow CD error msg). But I decided to use the original mednafen instead and it seems much more performant and without issue.

#2

I also get these slow CD read detected messages and i’m using the regular Beetle PSX (not the HW) on a 3.4GHz Desktop i5 4670. Not sure if this message is a performance issue though because i still run everything full speed.

Have you looked at latency settings? These are the ones that can cause the biggest performance issues. Make sure every setting there is disabled.

#3

let me guess, windows 10 and an nvidia card…

#4

I’m quite surprised, this core always performed badly on my mini retrogaming machine (broadwell pentium @ 2.56Ghz), forcing me to use pcsx-rearmed instead (it’s a lot faster than beetle-psx, even on x86).

#5

Yes Win10 and specifically Core i5-42010U @ 1.7GHz and a Geforce 840M. but i’m using software mode in BeetlePSX HW.

#6

Using Beetle PSX HW in software mode is like cutting a steak with a spoon.

#7

It’s the most accurate renderer, though.

#8

I think he meant that using a non-hw beetle-psx would make more sense.

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#9

The reason I don’t use the other ‘Beetle PSX’ core, is because it doesn’t seem to have any appreciable advantage. There’s no speedup, and the HW version has everything the other has to offer. Not entirely sure why there even has to be two cores.

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