Hi, I found a really old PC a while ago with a really old CPU and similarly aged other components. Point is, I tried RetroArch on it (it’s running Windows XP 32-bit) and after some time of crashes and whatnot I finally got it to boot. The core selection is very limited but whatever. I tried all of the SNES cores and all of the NES cores. The SNES cores all ran at like 10 FPS, very laggy, unplayable. The NES cores didn’t even start, with debugging enabled, I could see that it couldn’t find the dll for some reason, even tho it was looking on the right folder and the right name. So I wanted to see if it was RetroArch being janky or if the PC really lacked to power to manage SNES emulation. So I downloaded dedicated emulators for both systems and… I could play at full speed. That makes me wonder how unoptimised RetroArch is, is there a way to make it run better? It’s worth noting that I specifically searched for an emulator that I knew was written in assembly, to give the PC its best chance at running it, but hey, it did run in the end, and very smoothly at that. So, how come RetroArch needs that much more resources? I think that it might be more of an issue of the core itself, as Snes9x is more accurate that the other one (whose name I forgot) so it needs more power, but I wonder if there’s a way to reduce its requirements, and for other cores as well.
RetroArch itself doesn’t have much/any overhead beyond the core itself.
Which video driver are you using? if it’s falling back to GDI, that uses software scaling, which means fullscreen is very demanding.