Mednafen Beetle Saturn Samsung Galaxy S9 vs. Nvidia Shield TV

I tested Mednafen Beetle Saturn on both Samsung Galaxy S9 and Nvidia Shield TV. The results took me completely by surprise that Samsung Galaxy S9 had better FPS than Nvidia Shield TV. It’s not quite full speed on Samsung Galaxy S9, but it’s faster than Nvidia Shield TV. At this rate, next-gen Qualcomm chipsets for next-gen smartphones could prove full speed on Mednafen Beetle Saturn.

It’s not really surprising given the fact that the Mednafen Beetle Saturn core is running interpreter code with software rendering. The Galaxy S9 ARM CPU is 2 generations ahead of the CPU on the Shield TV at this point.

I haven’t tested Vulkan, yet, but does it work or will Retroarch crash like everytime we attempt to use Vulkan?

Vulkan works fine on my Shield TV.

This is certainly impressive. Even the Pentium G3258 struggles with Beetle Saturn.

I wonder if the Google Pixelbook’s Intel Core i7 7Y75 is powerful enough to run Mednafen Beetle Saturn full speed. I do plan on getting Google Pixelbook 512GB storage and 16GB Ram version or rumored Google Pixelbook 2 to test it out and see, but who knows at this point.

As soon as proper Dynarec emulation is implemented for the Beetle Saturn core, it should run full speed on most devices. Shield TV included.

Will there be any compatibility issues with Dynarec as it’s always the case with Yabause?

That CPU doesn’t look very good judging by the specs listed here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7Y75+%40+1.30GHz&id=2880

Compare with the Pentium G3258 (look at single thread rating) which also struggles: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G3258+%40+3.20GHz&id=2267

I can’t imagine that a dynarec would provide the same compatibility with a system like the Saturn, and there aren’t any plans to write one as far as I am aware.

It wouldn’t have the same compatibility, but if it was 90% the same with 100% more performance, it would be nice still. Yaba Sanshiro has been making pretty good compatibility improvements with it’s Dynarec emulation.

I would like to use rewind on Sega Saturn games and Yaba Sanshiro does not have rewind unlike Retroarch.