New RetroArc User, Advice on PS1 Titles vs ePSXe?

[VaultRaidingSloth]

Hello everyone!

I’ve been using ePSXe for a while now, and when searching for settings for various games I stumbled upon a thread and discovered RetroArc. I’ve seen various people say its the best in emulation of PS1 games, but I’ve run into some problems.

I’m playing Dino Crisis at the moment, and have it looking pretty good in ePSXe and most importantly, at 60FPS, even while recording. The same cannot be said when I tried RetroArc. I loaded up both Beetle cores, set the internal resolution to 2x, and it runs smooth but with the internal FPS reading at 30, in-game menus at 60, it’s worth noting it’s the same on 1x. Anything above 2x results in a laggy mess and looks nowhere near as clear as the other emulator.

I’m pretty sure this can’t be down to ePSXe just being more optimized, and there must be some issue causing the bad performance since I’ve only raised the internal res at this point. Any help clarifying this difference is appreciated!

ePSXe settings, just to show it runs smoothly on these:

PS: I really like the frontend, and would much prefer to use it for emulation, so I hope this problem can be resolved

[hunterk]

ePSXe is undoubtedly a lot faster than beetle-psx. However, you should be able to get good speeds with all of the bells and whistles on a reasonably recent machine with the beetle-psx-hw core.

The most important thing to check is that you have the vulkan or GL video driver (in settings > driver) active. If you use any other video driver, the core will fall back to software rendering, which is very demanding/slow, especially with increased internal resolution.

[fivefeet8]

Even without OpenGL or Vulkan, ePSXe’s software render at 2x resolutions is a lot faster than the beetle psx core. But it lacks many of the great filtering options of RetroArch. I’m using both on my Shield TV.

[VaultRaidingSloth]

Okay, seems the core wasn’t set correctly, it’s now on Vulcan.

It now can almost handle 4x smoothly, although the issue of the internal framerate is still 29.70FPS. If I bump up the CPU clock to 300%, it pumps the internal to 60, but it’s not as it should be, it’s basically on fast forward compared to the 60 on ePSXe?

Is like my refresh rate is being halved even on default settings?

[hunterk]

Depends on the game. A lot of games didn’t run at 60 fps. If you’re not hearing audio crackling, it’s going the right speed already.

[VaultRaidingSloth]

Okay, looking online, you’re right, it’s capped at 31FPS (PC version at least), but I added Retro to my Steam library and even though internal says 29.70, Steam tracks it at 60, which seems accurate as it feels like 60, and when cranking settings through the roof, it dips the counter. Not sure how this can contradict itself though xD

After several attempts, I got Vulkan working. At first, it would green screen the game at launch but seems to be working now. My card (7970 GHz Edition) while old, can handle the 16x internal res, although choosing the last filtering option (j something) wrecked it down to 40FPS and 80% utilization xD). With GL, 8x was the limit.

Currently looks like this with current settings, 16x, 4x MSAA and nearest filter:

It was still a tad clearer on ePSXe, noticeably the “x” shape dithering was removed, still here at the moment. Any advice on shaders while I look them up, they look quite daunting in the menu lol

Cheers

[hunterk]

There’s a core option to disable the dithering pattern.

Regarding the 30 / 60 thing, 30 is the internal frames per second, which is how many frames the console processes, while 60 is the number of frames the console sent out to the TV. That is, the console did its own frame-duping to match the refresh rate of the TV (note: this can lead to tearing, even on a real console on a CRT).

[fivefeet8]

You could also try enabling the PGP features in the Beetle PSX hardware core options. A similar effect to ePSXe’s sub pixel precision mode, but with a bit more control and accuracy.