Mednafen PSX Intermittent Slowdown

Libretro Cores
#1

I’ve been experiencing some slowdown issues with the Mednafen PSX core while using the crt-royale-ntsc-256px-svideo shader. I know that this shader is very demanding so my first thought was that maybe my computer just isn’t powerful enough for it. But then I noticed that there was a distinct pattern to the slowdowns. Normally the framerate is a solid 59.9 FPS but, every 10 seconds, it’ll dip down to around 50 FPS for about a second or two before going back to normal. This even happens in areas that aren’t very demanding such as the games main menu.

Every other core runs perfectly with the same shader. Even Mupen64 with a dramatically increased internal resolution doesn’t have any issues with performance. So far only Mednafen PSX is giving me these issues.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

#2

Could be related to your OS’s power management features.

#3

Hey hunterk, thanks for the fast reply. :wink:

That’s an interesting thought. Were there any specific power settings that you had in mind? Currently I’m using the default high performance plan with hard disks set to never turn off.

#4

Try enabling CD image cache

#6

Just wanted to update this thread with some new info: It seems that the issue was with my sound drivers. When I first installed Windows 10 the drivers for my sound card weren’t ready yet so I had to remove it and just use onboard audio…which wasn’t well supported either. A few weeks ago Creative finally got around to pushing new drivers for Win10 and with my sound card back in place I’m no longer having this issue.

There was still the occasional hiccup now and then but updating RetroArch to the latest nighly solved that as well. As of now PSX games are running perfectly!

#7

Interesting. Windows 10 has had a number of strange performance quirks, so I guess this makes one more. Thanks for the update :slight_smile:

#8

Windows (and the closed source cottage industry surrounding it that keeps adding hacks to their audio/video drivers of all sorts without fully grasping the consequences of these hacks, and with nobody to be able to do code reviews since, well, the thing is closed source) keeps regressing more and more when it comes to achieving tolerable runtime performance. I have to laugh at anybody who thinks Windows is ‘preferable’ for emulators when Linux has long since left it in the dust ever since DRM/KMS video drivers became standard.

I find it to be laughable too that people still want to cling to this Windows desktop ecosystem despite the ever-worsening botnet-type antics MS is employing on their own users. You get what you deserve at this point I guess sad to say.

That doesn’t mean I won’t support WinRT or making a Windows Phone port happen, but honestly, on the desktop at this point, you are not getting the best experience when using Windows, instead it’s the other way around. I think even desktop composition on OSX is not as bad to emulators’ runtime performance as Windows’ is.

#9

I’m not sure what caused my performance problems in Windows 10 to stop. The last driver update I did (NVidia) didn’t fix it at the time, but over the last few weeks I’ve had no problems with RetroArch being able to get enough CPU power. I’ve even switched back to the default Balanced power plan since it’s not hurting performance anymore.