Frame Skip?

RetroArch General
#1

I tried playing a gameboy advance game and noticed that it was a little too slow to be playable. I remembed fba-m was playable, and tried the same game there, and it works, only to notice that it had frame skip set to 2, changing this to 0 resulted in the same performance as RetroArch.

Is there a way to set frame skipping on RetroArch? Or, is there something I could do to increase performance for game boy advance games? The other systems I’ve tried all play fine. Does display resolution of a full screen window make much difference with an emulator? (Playing full screen on Windows 7 running at 1080P on a TV)

#2

Judging by comments Squarepusher made on another forum (GBATemp), I doubt you will ever see frame skipping in RetroArch.

And it’s not a bad thing.

VBA-M is quite demanding from my experience. You might have to wait until the team is done with the gpsp-libretro port (very fast PSP GBA emulator by Exophase).

#3

What are your PC’s system specs?

Anything higher-specced than a PS3/360 CPU-wise (ie. Pentium 4 2.4GHz level) should do a decent job of running most GBA games with VBA Next at fullspeed.

Also, the gpSP port to libretro might be a solution if you have an old PC - it will be 32bit only at first though - not sure if you’re running a 32bit OS or not.

#4

I don’t remember what the processor speed is right off hand, but it is a ASUS eeePC with an Atom processor. Nice little case, about the size of a Wii. But, a little light in the cpu. I would guess somewhere in the 1.8ghz-2.0ghz range. Works well for most things, couldn’t handle lowest settings for animation on HyperSpin though.

And, yes, it is a 32bit chip, so Win7 32bit.

Thanks for the responses.

EDIT: Looked it up, I was wrong. It is an Intel Atom 330, 64bit, 1.6ghz dual core. And, now that I realize it is running 64bit Windows I will change the core dlls. In my defense, it has been a couple years since I put it together and installed Windows.

EDIT2: I switched to 64bit RetroArch along with dlls. Playing with settings gets me 60fps on occasion, closer to 52fps on average. It seems the processor has hyperthreading, and it pegs one “processor” (as Windows sees it) as 100%). Is there a way to split the load between two processors? Yeah, I know, that is probably a dream.

I also tried Meteor, that Lex compiled, fps is about 15 worse.

#5

Interesting, seems your Atom CPU performs even worse than the Wii at this point (by a few fps).

Just out of interest, could you give me some indications of exactly what kind of FPS you’re getting on games like this:

1 - Final Fantasy 5 (just try out the intro - should have a heavy FPS dip) 2 - Final Fantasy 6 (same deal) 3 - Super Mario Advance 1/2 4 - Sega Rally 5 - Tekken Advance

I still have plans to look for speed optimizations for VBA Next because certain games (such as Final Fantasy 5/6) still dip below 60fps at certain occasions on even PS3/360.

#6

I don’t see most the roms you mentioned. I think I have a full set, it is possible the scraper missed them.

Super Mario Advance 1 intro runs at about 49, gets down to 47 at worst. Original Mario Brothers ran at 60 when playing it.

Sega Rally intro runs at 37. Tekken runs at 45 during the game play part of the intro.

Will update with the others once I get them imported.

#7

Interesting - for Super Mario Advance 1 at least that appears to be far worse than the Wii (which mostly maintains a steady 60fps with that game).

I guess we can take byuu’s claims that an Atom smoked the PS3 when it came to bsnes with a grain of salt then - it can’t even ‘smoke’ the Wii.

#8

That is interesting. When I first set up snes emulation in retroarch I tried bsnes first and determined it was unplayable, though to be fair that was the 32bit version. I tried the different versions and none of them were playable.

If it weren’t for hyperthreading I would imagine it would run fine, but Windows treating hyperthreading as additional cores means only half a core can be devoted to a thread. At least this is the understanding I have of it, and how it appears to be playing out in task manager.

I have another thing to look into though, I saw in device manager that there was a coprocessor without a driver loaded for it. I don’t know what Windows is seeing though. As for other system specs, it has 4gb of ram with 1gb of that devoted to video.

Edit: Tried out Final Fantasy 5 & 6 and Super Mario Bros Advance 2. FF5 stayed in the upper 50s during the intro and seemed like it would be playable, though a little bit choppy. FF6 intro got down to 39fps at the worst part. SMBa2 intro went around 50fps on average.

The full specs on the machine can be found here, http://uk.asus.com/Eee/EeeBox_PC/EeeBox_PC_EB1012/#specifications. Mine is upgraded to 4GB, and sadly lacks the card reader ports.

#9

Does snes9x, at least, run at full speed?

#10

It’s kinda strange that you are getting that bad of fps with vba. You should definitely disable rewind which should bring all your games up to full speed with vba. I have a Zotac Atom N330 board so its pretty the same has you. The main difference is that I have a 32bit Arch Linux system instead of Windows.

With the Super Mario Advance games and Tekken I get full speed with rewind enabled. The Final Fantasy games still dip for a second or two below 60fps with rewind disabled.

So yeah disable rewind and then test those games out again. You should hopefully notice a big difference because some of thoses games shouldn’t be running that badly for you anyways.

Squarepusher, does any of the consoles have rewind??

#11

Trust me, I know when rewind is on and when it’s off on the consoles - I wrote the things myself you know.

#12

Of course I know. I was just asking do they have rewind? I haven’t messed with retroarch on the ps3 for a long time and don’t think it had rewind if i remember right and I haven’t touched the other consoles so I have no clue.

The disabling rewind part was for tom.

#13

Yeah, the PS3/360 ports have a ‘rewind on/off’ option. And yes, the games definitely take an FPS hit when it’s enabled - so if it’s enabled at all times Tom would do well to disable it to get a good speed boost on his netbook.

#14

I just tried turning off rewind. For the Final Fantasy 6 Advance intro I gain 1-5fps. Hitting start and watching the beginning of the story gets around 50fps.

Super Mario Advance 1 playing Mario 2 runs at 60fps, the intro got down to 57fps for just a second right at the start. Sega Ralley runs at 45fps and Tekken Advance ran at 58-60 during the gameplay portion of the intro.

It actually isn’t on a Netbook. It is a computer about the size of a Wii that is attached via HDMI out to a TV running at 1080P.

Lex said, “Does snes9x, at least, run at full speed?”

Snes9x runs perfectly.

I had mentioned earlier that there was a “coprocessor” that Windows couldn’t find a driver for. I went with nVidia’s drivers instead of ASUS and updated everything, I didn’t notice any change though.

#15

That’s because most emulators (especially non-HLE ones) don’t have any use for additional cores - if anything, the synchronization it would impose could have the potential to make it even slower than just doing everything on one processor.

Raw single-core performance is what counts here.

#16

Understood.

I overclocked it, adding about 300mhz. Only tested on Final Fantasy 6 and it gained at least a few frames. I expect that will make the majority of gameboy advance games playable.