Hello
I’m running BSNES Mercury Accuracy on the latest version of retroarch. CPU GPU and OS are:
Intel Xeon X5660 (6 cores 12 threads @ 4.4ghz) GTX 970 Windows 10 64 bit
So the core is only using about 4% of my cpu at any time, yet i’m getting slowdowns. Not sure what I can do to fix the issue, since I’m quite a new user of retroarch.
Are you using any shaders? bsnes-accuracy is double-width vs other SNES cores and that can cause performance drops if you’re using an already-heavy shader.
I’m only using Easymode CRT why would i get a performance drop though when it’s putting almost 0% stress on my PC
Should I not be using this core?
There are a few things that could be happening, one of which is that your OS may be clocking down your CPU because it’s finishing the emulation fast enough that most of the frame is spent idling. You could try running a single-threaded benchmark–something like superpi–in the background to see if that’s going on; anything that will crank one of your cores up to 100% without straining the rest of them.
Ahhhh why didn’t I think about that, my cpu might not be being used enough to clock up. I’ll mess with the performance settings and see if that is what is happening.
1 question I have, how can i change the resolution of retroarch/the game i’m running
You mean in when running in a window? You should be able to just drag the corner to whatever size you want. Hitting ‘f’ will toggle fullscreen.
I’m running in fullscreen mode, I thought there was an option for it. Guess I was wrong.
Seeing as I’m new to retroarch, you mind explaining to me what the difference is between balanced and accuracy? Is there any visual difference between to two? (sorry as you can see i’m completely new to this.)
Also I would like to know if there are some tweaks I can do inside of retroarch to gain performance?/ like I noticed there is a driver tab in config.
Hard GPU sync seems to make my performance worse? Do I need to change a other option for that?
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
Accuracy vs balanced only affects a handful of (shitty) games, most famously Air Strike Patrol. Accuracy core also forces 512 px horizontal resolution all the time (as opposed to just when necessary), which doesn’t play nicely with all shaders. I personally use balanced for most things.
Yes, hard gpu sync 0 has a significant performance impact but it also reduces input latency, so it’s good to turn it on if you have the headroom. There’s not a whole of things you can do to improve performance on the RetroArch side of things–other than disabling shaders and hard gpu sync–but some cores have ‘core options’ (you can get to them by going back into the menu after loading a game; you’ll see ‘core options’ on that first quick menu screen) that can help. Bsnes isn’t one of them, though.
[QUOTE=hunterk;35387]Accuracy vs balanced only affects a handful of (shitty) games, most famously Air Strike Patrol. Accuracy core also forces 512 px horizontal resolution all the time (as opposed to just when necessary), which doesn’t play nicely with all shaders. I personally use balanced for most things.
Yes, hard gpu sync 0 has a significant performance impact but it also reduces input latency, so it’s good to turn it on if you have the headroom. There’s not a whole of things you can do to improve performance on the RetroArch side of things–other than disabling shaders and hard gpu sync–but some cores have ‘core options’ (you can get to them by going back into the menu after loading a game; you’ll see ‘core options’ on that first quick menu screen) that can help. Bsnes isn’t one of them, though.[/QUOTE]
BSNES is better than Snes9x right? I mean in most situations. So that forced 512px horizontal resolution has no impact on visual quality?
I’m just trying to figure out why I’m getting slowdowns with such a strong pc for an snes emu. I’m getting some crackle in the sound when it slows down, i read that this can have to do with vsync? Maybe that is the whole issue?
(i’m getting zero issue with balanced so far, but I’m feeling like I should be able to use accuracy. Mostly just worried about losing visual fidelity)
There’s no loss in visual fidelity. Balanced cranks up to 512 px horizontal when a game actually uses it for high-res text (Seiken Densetsu 3 and Marvelous are examples of this).
The differences between snes9x and bsnes balanced aren’t huge and you generally won’t run into any differences (much less notice them) unless you’re into playing really weird, often terrible games. If you only play the top 50 games or whatever, you’ll have pretty much no way of knowing which is which in a Pepsi challenge situation. You can find more details here: http://wiki.libretro.com/index.php?title=Nintendo_SNES_Core_Compatibility The biggest issue with older versions of snes9x is actually in the audio but recent versions don’t have these problems.
If you’re getting framerate dips accompanied by crackling, that usually indicates an actual performance issue. Your CPU is clearly fast enough to have consistent 60 fps, though, which is why I suggested the idling issue. You might also make sure that your power settings are set to “performance” and, just to test, you might try disabling hyperthreading in your BIOS, if that is available.
[QUOTE=hunterk;35393]There’s no loss in visual fidelity. Balanced cranks up to 512 px horizontal when a game actually uses it for high-res text (Seiken Densetsu 3 and Marvelous are examples of this).
The differences between snes9x and bsnes balanced aren’t huge and you generally won’t run into any differences (much less notice them) unless you’re into playing really weird, often terrible games. If you only play the top 50 games or whatever, you’ll have pretty much no way of knowing which is which in a Pepsi challenge situation. You can find more details here: http://wiki.libretro.com/index.php?title=Nintendo_SNES_Core_Compatibility The biggest issue with older versions of snes9x is actually in the audio but recent versions don’t have these problems.
If you’re getting framerate dips accompanied by crackling, that usually indicates an actual performance issue. Your CPU is clearly fast enough to have consistent 60 fps, though, which is why I suggested the idling issue. You might also make sure that your power settings are set to “performance” and, just to test, you might try disabling hyperthreading in your BIOS, if that is available.[/QUOTE]
Alright thank you very much for all your help and the link. I think I will continue to use Balanced then, seeing as it so far is working flawlessly. I’m going to continue to mess around with settings and do the single core stress test. If I have anymore issues I’ll report back, however Balanced seems to be running butter smooth.
Snes9x is the best core for playing with in most situations. Bsnes is only recommended for otherwise-unplayable games like Speedy Gonzales. Bsnes does not have good serialization for input playback sync (causing desyncs), is too slow for netplay, runs too slowly for decent fast-forward, and causes more power draw for your computer overall.
I have played with all the SNES cores quite a lot and have come to the conclusion that Snes9x has the most balanced sanity and feature-complete experience overall.
Regarding the slow emulation, bsnes runs in 1 thread (so, on 1 core of your computer’s CPU, or half if you have hyperthreading enabled) with libco managing synchronization between the various emulated processors in that thread. The various processors in an SNES (PPU, APU, CPU, etc.) run at wildly different rates, so we’ve been told by SNES LLE emulator authors that there’s a large performance impact to synchronizing these processors as separate threads; so much that it is more effective to use libco and run them all in 1 thread. I’m not sure how well I believe that, but I’m no low-level hardware emulation expert, so I can’t contest it.
I haven’t tried it in awhile, but SNES9x had a black screen freeze with MottZilla’s BS Zelda hack, which seems like the best way to play that game. It’s a pretty nice remake of Zelda 1 with some extra Satellaview stuff going on. Balanced, Accuracy and, weirdly, SNES9x Next can run it.
BSNES Mercury Balanced is still working flawlessly, not a single slow down encountered today.
Wow OK I just tried snes9x next, it’s even running games in my phone smooth. What are the actual differences between bsnes mercury and snes9x next? Is it using multicore processing or something? I used to use snes9x a while back on its own
Here in short: http://wiki.libretro.com/index.php?title=Nintendo_SNES_Core_Compatibility
(just noticed that was already posted)
I’m on the verge of giving up on BSNES Mercury Accuracy, because sound still crackles even on my 3.5 GHz six-core computer with 8 gigs of RAM. Snes9x was a reliable workhorse for years and I’m not sure why it’s still an option at this point since it seems it hasn’t updated in half a decade. The only BSNES Mercury Accuracy does that Snes9x couldn’t is run Stunt Race FX without any flashing but there’s still something weird going on because the timer moves at normal speed, but the car doesn’t, so I always run out of time before even finishing the second race. The Snes9x version seemed to handle poorly but I was able to at least finish the first two circuits.
Don’t bother with “accuracy” and try the “balanced” version, see if it serves you better.
I know I’m knew here, and only been playing with RetroArch for just a brief few hours - but my new computer is an i5-6600k OC’d to 4.2Ghz, with 16GB of DDR4-3200. I noticed that even playing Contra on bsnes-Mercury Performance audio kept crackling and stuttering, same with StarFox; I knew that bsnes was demanding, but I figured that was excessive. I stumbled across something that completely resolved it, a post which mentioned that the audio emulation was tied to the screen refresh rate. So I figured what the heck? I went into Settings > Video, and noticed that the Estimated Monitor Framerate and the Refresh Rate were kind of off by a few percent, so I pressed X on Estimated Monitor Framerate, causing the Refresh Rate to change to a number more inline with what the Estimated Monitor Framerate was. Went back in game, and bam - no more crackling audio! I registered here specifically to see if this might help you and someone else who comes across this - might stick around and see what other useful info I can pick up here! 