I found RetroArch a few months back and fell in love with how smooth it is compared to base emulators, but I still have an issue playing games on my TV. My main monitor is very smooth if I set up the Estimated Monitor Refresh Rate properly, but if I do the same to the TV, it doesn’t seem to be completely smooth. Since I’m on Windows 7, I can turn off Desktop Composition and makes it mostly smooth. The problem is that this introduces some tearing and there’s got to be a better solution than that. This issue doesn’t happen if I unplug my main monitor, so I figured it must be some VSync bug with Windows or Multi-Monitor setups in general. Considering the issue isn’t talked about very often, I guess a lot of people must use a dedicated device with connected to one display.
I ended up trying Lakka, which seems to blank out the other display and makes the TV the only working display while it’s running. I have audio running through it properly, but it seems like some of my CRT shaders don’t work on it, or just lack the ability to change parameters. I would rather not have to reboot just to use my PC for other things, so in the end I’d rather stick with Windows if there’s a way to blank out other displays like Lakka does.
From what I have read, VSync won’t work independently on both monitors at different synced rates. My TV runs at around 60.015Hz, while my monitor is at 59.955Hz, which I guess is spread just enough to cause stuttering. This happens in other applications that can’t sync to display, so I know this isn’t a specific RetroArch problem. No matter how many countless searches I do, I come up with either nothing, or the person had the issue found a solution and never said how. People here actually care about smooth emulation, a topic that barely gets brought up elsewhere for some reason. At this point, I’m just getting a bit sick of troubleshooting this, and I’m posting here (considering the huge selling point of RetroArch is to run smooth) hoping for some advice on this.
Thanks for the great emulation Front-End, it really is great other than this specific issue for me.