General advice/tricks for improved performance?

RetroArch Android devices
#1

I’ve got a Galaxy Tab A8, which I quite like, but the hardware’s far from the best. I know I can’t expect too much from an entry level tablet I got for cheap, but there are times I wish it performed better and that I could play some light DS or PSP, maybe even PS2 and Dreamcast, or PS1 using shaders, without so much stuttering and frame skipping.

Are there any ways to maximize performance on weaker hardware? Which settings should I definitely change? I’d like to keep using shaders for now, how to do it on weak hardware?

#2

Cores usually have options to improve the speed…
For example Flycast, in the video options, Alpha Sorting in Per-Strip improves frame rates, Fog Effects and Anisotropic Filtering disabled also help. In the performance options you can enable Auto Skip Frame.

In general, Threaded Video improves performance at the cost of losing fidelity, only recommended if you are missing a few fps.

The shader is a matter of testing, usually the ones that say Fast and Multipass are faster.

The vulkan video driver is the recommended option, the most advanced and optimized but it is not compatible with all devices. Then there is glcore. But I have noticed that on some slow devices, gl is faster, it’s a matter of testing.

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#3

I’m struggling the most with getting PS1 to run well with shaders on PCSX ReARMed right now, since Beetle and DuckStation didn’t run so good on my weak tablet, so this is the core I have left. I’ve got threaded video on and it’s been helping, though i still need to improve the performance a bit more somehow. I agree GL is better on weaker hardware, but all of the shaders with a glow/halation/bloom effect, that I like, give me nothing but a black screen, so I’m left with Vulkan… it’s not the end of the world, but damn… I wish I could get more out of my new tablet.

#4

One “trick” you can try is using PAL-versions if you don’t already, since they only need to refresh 50 fps instead of 60. Downsides depend on the game. I’m not sure what refresh rate options are now available for Android, so you could also adjust the rate of the device to get perfect scrolling.

Also I’d be surprised if you can’t even run PSP games at 1x rendering resolution, since most only render 30 FPS.

It’s also possible to save performance by not using the maximum of the screen resolution via the scaling settings.

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#5

I gave this a shot and it’s improved a bit, thanks! Though FPS is still less than ideal, even if a bit better, I guess what I really need is to find out how to get glow/halation/bloom glslp. shaders to work on my tablet, though if I can’t I’ll try downloading most of my ROMs in PAL.