Ah, thanks for the advice. I will try this version later this evening. BTW, why is the performance on the new kernel update causing these performance issues? I’m assuming it’s a matter of optimization?
The performance and scrolling are perfect 
Much appreciated.
However, I can’t get the audio to work. I’m using an HDMI to VGA converter with a 3.5mm audio jack. Are there any audio settings on this version I should adjust?
Go to Audio/Output and then ‘Device’ and see if you can cycle through the lists if it’s shown? If ‘Device’ is blank, then just enter ‘null’ from keyboard and restart Retroarch, then go back and the available outputs should be seen.
Not sure why 5.10 isn’t working correctly on the recent RPi4 builds, but it’s definitely a regression at the moment unfortunately.
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Has the regression been reported and posted on Lakka Github page?
That worked! Unfortunately, it does seem as if the scrolling is as bad as it was on the later nightlies… Aaaarrggh! Oh well. I think I’d better just wait for the next stable release. Thanks for your help.
I have noticed something interesting. I set my audio device to ‘default=headphones’ and this seems to be what is causing the jittery scrolling. I disabled it (ie. set back to ‘null’) and the scrolling is fine. Do you know which are the device names I should use for the HDMI to VGA headphone jack or what I should use for my small USB soundcard? My normal device name for my soundcard which normally works on the stable build doesn’t work in this version.
You can’t cycle through the list of audio devices ? There is an example in this video to switch audio device to usb soundcard.
Please try to provide audio logs.
Thank you.
Unfortunately not. I can only cycle between them after I manually type in ‘null’ and restart Retroarch. After getting a sound option that works, the performance begins to stutter again. (Note: I can cycle in the stable version as well as the latest nightlies. Unfortunately, I cannot cycle in the 2021-04-04 nightly.) I will try get you an audio log from the 2021-04-04 nightly.
Also which resolution are you using ? You get stutter will all cores ?
I don’t have an RPI 4, but I’ve had an issue where a misconfigured audio setup had actually caused the stuttering. On my Banana Pi, the games would sometimes stutter when the audio was set to a device that didn’t actually exist, due to driver issues.
To debug audio, you could try the following: Lakka documentation - Troubleshooting Lakka See “Audio device logs” and post the output here. Also, compare the output with the stable version that had no issues.
The correct audio device for a HDMI to VGA headphone adapter would be just the standard HDMI audio output. You shouldn’t set any “headphones” or “analog” audio output. Again, I do not have an RPI so I cannot tell you the correct device names, but the first step would be to see if your system can find the HDMI sound card.
If I remember correctly, the RPI has some settings that you can set at boot time to tell it where to output audio, either in a config.txt file on the boot partition or on the kernel command line. Once that is set up properly, the kernel audio driver needs to be loaded, and finally the alsa configuration needs to be set to the correct sound card to send the output there.
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I’m using a VGA CRT at 1024 x 768. I haven’t tested many cores, but I have noticed the stutter on the Nestopia and Genesis Plus GX cores.
Apologies, I forgot about the audio logs. I will try send them to you as soon as I can.
Just tried the latest stable 3.0 and a nightly build from 31st May for the RPi4 aarch64, we still unfortunately have a performance issue compared to the 4th April build, many cores just don’t run well at all.
That’s a pity. I guess we’ll just have to be patient and wait for further updates. Which cores did you test? I only tested some FBNeo, Nestopia and Genesis Plus GX roms for smooth scrolling. I activated the frame rate display, and whilst all of them showed rates higher than 60Hz, I could still notice stuttering. Checked the previous stable build and the games all had silky smooth scrolling.
Oddly enough, when I disabled the audio drivers, the frame rate jumped to 75Hz (I believe this is my VGA CRTs refresh rate). Unfortunately, whilst 75Hz is smooth as silk, the games are now way too fast, lol.
I think that, in the meantime, I will get updated cores and use them with the last stable release (pre 3.0). However, I noticed that some of the cores haven’t been updated in some time (FBNeo hasn’t been updated since November last year and there is no Swanstation core) https://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/linux/armv7-neon-hf/latest/
Is it possible for someone to update these cores on this repository so that we can use them with the previous build?
My suggestion would be to fix the audio issues first as they seem to be the root of this issue. Post your audio logs and we’ll try to help.
Edit: As mentioned above, please also post audio logs of the older stable Lakka version for comparison, that would be very helpful.
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I hope these debug logs will help. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zzJNxj2kYt_u2D8IxvzKsvcreX2JPra1?usp=sharing
I split them into folders for 2.3.2 and 3.0 I tested out 3 games across both builds: Airbuster (FB Neo) Abadox (Nestopia) Thunderforce IV (Genesis Plus GX) .
I’ve just installed version 3.1 (32-bit) and, unfortunately, the issue remains the same - jerky scrolling whenever audio is active, in spite of the framerate counter readying a solid 60FPS. Additionally, I cannot route the audio to my external USB soundcard, despite using the same settings as 2.3.2. Only HDMI and headphone audio routing seem to work.
Same for me too, it’s not been right since the 5.4 to 5.10 kernel switch in early April.
Thank you for the logs @retroFuture, I’m sure they will be helpful at some point, but these are the Retroarch logs, it would be nice to see the audio logs instead:
Lakka documentation - Troubleshooting Lakka (under “Audio device logs”)
This will simply list the sound devices that have been detected by Linux. A simple comparison of this output between the stable and nightly Lakka versions would allow us to see if there’s anything wrong with the sound devices on the system level.
It would be helpful to see the outputs of the following commands:
aplay -L
aplay -l
dmesg
lsmod
If the problem is related to the kernel, someone who owns an RPI 4 could help track down the problem by testing different kernel versions and see which one introduced the bug.
Okay, finally fixed my issue, and I should have spotted it before so I blame my age…
Basically setting hdmi_enable_4kp60=1 in config.txt just doesn’t work with this kernel at the moment, so my 4K TV was just running at 30Hz and that’s why everything ran like junk.
Added the below to config.txt instead (to force 1080p60) and it’s all peachy, but only in gl mode, vulkan still doesn’t play nicely in HDMI-0 and wants to use HDMI-1 in 4k30 instead (again junk performance).
hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=16
Obviously most folks without 4k displays won’t have this issue, but I guess it’s easy enough to workaround for now.