I’m not sure if my little ATI Radeon HD 6450A is doing anything. How can I test it during game play and how can I get a driver for it? I’m coming from Win 10 and this whole Linux thing is new to me.
GPUs don’t really do a whole lot for most cores. Their main use in RetroArch is for shader effects.
There’s a utility that might work for you called ‘radeontop’ that can show GPU utilization for Radeon cards using the open source Mesa driver.
Emulators tend to do most of their work on the CPU. The GPU only really starts to take on load if the CPU can feed it instructions fast enough, which unfortunately is rarely the case because most modern processors are scaled out with multiple cores (which generally doesn’t help most emulation much) rather than scaling up with more out of each core.
If your system is not performing how you think it should, check out your CPU’s STR (Single Thread Rating) at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and compare that with others that have the performance you are looking for. If you have similar STR’s, then your graphics card or drivers might indeed be a bottle neck.
That’s a shame that emulators rely so heavily on cpus and single core performance. My little Atom was ranked 2,254 on that list and only scored 352.
Its (mostly) because the devices they are emulating are single core devices. Consoles, until recently, were not very big into multi-core processors. Though they did occasionally have some co-processors that (might) benefit from a multiple cores.