Emulation super slow

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hello,

I just bought a quite powerful pc, And I welcomed the idea of installing retroarch instead of hunting and installing all those emulators separately. However, everything I tried so far runs super slow. And yet, the emulators I tried separately work fine.

There must be something I need to do in the retroarch configuration to bring the speed to normal. Unfortunately, the beginner’s guide does not cover this, and neither did the videos on youtube I could find. A lot of topics on the forum mention how someone has trouble with this or that emulator, but I seem to be the only one to have the problem in general…

My computer runs on Windows 10, has a 4,2Ghz processor, 16 G ram and a 1060 graphics card.

The retroarch version is 1.6.0.

I’d taker as an exemple the first one I tried, visualboyadvance-M-WX, and the first game I tried, Eternal Duelist Soul. Opened from Retroarch, the music is just a screech, and the first character’s text appears a letter a second. Yet, I searched and installed separately the exact same version of this emulator, and used the same rom, and everything is normal speed.

I then tried nestopia with Strider. I couldn’t find version 1.48 on it’s own, but 1.47 works perfectly on its own.

I suspect I will get the same thing all the time, but there must be something to do in the retroarch configuration to correct this, but I’m no computer expert, and can’t figure it out.

Thanks for any help.

#2

Ok, there could be a lot of different things at play. The first step is to get a log of the bad behavior. To do that, open your RetroArch directory and shift+right-click somewhere in there and choose ‘open command window here…’. In that terminal, type: retroarch_debug.exe --menu --verbose --log-file log.txt Do whatever you need to do to cause the behavior and then close RetroArch. You should now have a file named ‘log.txt’ that contains the log information. Copy and paste its contents on pastebin.com and then post a link to the log here.

#3

When you are running it do you have anything else running?

#4

I hope I did all this right. This is what I got in the log.

https://pastebin.com/JBVTRSw3

Thanks for analyzing it! Does not make much sense to me…

#5

No. I wish the problem was that easy to solve! lol This made me think, though, that there is a difference between the stand-alone gba emulator, which is on my hard drive, while retroarch was installed on my ssd. This might be a factor?

#6

Hello, I had given up on retroarch and just used the solo emulators, but the recent 12.3 update seemed nice, and I tried again. I do get the same issues as before, but reading some other posts, it seems the problem might be too much performance. I read a post where someone said the NES was laggy, but more advanced consoles were fine. He said that was because Retroarch puts too high settings, especially resolution by default, and somehow that was a problem for older game systems, I’m surprised that not everyone has the same issue if that’s the case, but I’ll give that a try. I’m not sure how to tweak resolution in retroarch, though, especially for specific systems, and I don’t want to mess it up worse than it is. Any pointers? Thanks.

#7

I use retroarch since a very looong time, my pc is not new nor powerful: every system I use works full speed. I also use shaders, run-ahead and frame delays: no issues with retroarch at all regarding performance on a pc windows machine at least 6 to 8 years old from 8 bit gen up to gamecube and most ps2 games @1080p.

on what system are you on? my cpu is a i5 6400 (it came out in 2015)…

#8

Resolution can cause performance problems when you have video effects enabled (shaders/filters) or the internal resolution was increased too much for the GPU to handle. So first step is making sure anything like that is off (usually the case by default I believe). What you could try if you haven’t already is to change the Video driver in the settings, otherwise I would recommend you look for a spare USB drive and look into Lakka as a portable Linux Retroarch install and see if that’s different.

#9

Hello! Thanks for the replies! My pc is Intel Core i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz
Ram 16G graphics card: Geforce GTX 1060 6GB Maybe not top of the line, about 4 years old (in fact, the time of my first post!) but plays PCSX2 easily on its own, but under retroarch, pains to do NES or Genesis… This time, I didn’t install retroarch itself, but actually installed the newest Launchbox, (that’s what I meant by 12.3) and I still haven’t even figured how to access the settings… I wish it came with a read me file telling me some keyboard shortcuts. since it’s not an option in the launchbox screen itself! I’ll try to look what the resolution is, and if any shaders are on when I finally find how… Not so long ago, I also tried Core, another frontend, same thing. Wether there is a frontend or not, Retroarch doesn’t seem to like my PC…

#10

what cores did you use to play nes & genesis?

I suggest to download Retroarch from the official site, download the zipped 64bit version for windows, and try again with Genesis Plus GX and FCEUmm. do not change any settings to start with and see how it goes.