Problem with snes9x or with vulkan?

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hi , I’m new here and this is my first topic. I just want to say off the bat that I absolutely love Retroarch! I was born in the late seventies and grew up playing all of the old consoles and now being able to play all of my old favorites again is absolutely amazing.

I am having a couple of issues though so far and here is one of them.

I tried using the vulkan driver since I noticed improved performance in some other games that I play and while it has worked for some cores, there is a very serious problem I’m having when I try and play snes games with it.

I have not tried using it with the other snes cores but when I try and use vulkan with snes9x under windows 7 64, I get an instant bsod when I try and load a game. I could have swore I had it working a few weeks ago but maybe I was using gl or dx11. Both of those still seem to work fine for snes9x.

Vulkan is working fine for the other cores that I am using such as Genesis plus GX , FB Alpha and Beetle PSX HW. I have only encountered this with Snes9x so far. I can reproduce the crash every single time now.

I thought maybe by chance something was corrupted with Windows so I went and reinstalled it and all my drivers and even on a fresh clean install it still does it.

I have an i7 920 overclocked to 3.78 , 6 gigs of 1600 ram and an evga gtx 1060 sc. Not sure if this is relevant to my hardware or my os or just something between snes9x and vulkan.

It’s such a bad crash though that it even resets my bios settings.

Has anyone else encountered this? I mean, I can keep using gl or dx11 just fine for my snes games however I was trying to see if I can fix another issue I am having so wanted to try it. I think I will just start another topic for that one.

#2

yikes. A crash that bad is typically a problem with the GPU/driver, but I haven’t seen any other reports of this…

You could try running RetroArch from a command line with --verbose --log-file log.txt and it should print to that file up to the point of the crash. That might give us some clues as to what’s happening leading up to the crash.

#3

Well I have tried three different video drivers and all have done the same thing. I tried the ones that came on the disc, the latest one and one random one in between those two.

I am not sure what you mean by running RetroArch from a command line and with that option.

I am not sure if I want to force another blue screen and have to setup my bios again. It’s not that big a deal I guess, I know all settings I use but still… If you think it would help I guess I can though.

Edit - This is the only time I’ve had a problem with Vulkan. Like I mentioned, I’ve used it without problems with sega and neo geo and playstation roms. I even use Vulkan for Dota 2 without problem.

#4

No worries if you don’t feel like doing it. There’s not really anything we can do to pinpoint the issue, though.

Just making this report is something, though. I’ll keep an eye out for anyone else reporting similar behavior.

#5

Do you have a system that vulkan works with snes9x?

#6

Not at the moment. My work machine doesn’t have Vulkan drivers anymore, but when it did, it worked fine.

#7

I could have sworn I had vulkan working with it a few weeks ago. But since it blue screened the first time using it , I can’t get it to even load a single game from snes9x without the blue screen.

The video card is not too old. I could maybe later try a different snes core besides snes9x to see if I can reproduce the problem and then narrow it down to just snes9x. It’s just that all the other cores have that slowdown in them when a lot of things happen on the screen.