PUAE poor performance, but running the same core via RetroBat is fine?

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hi, I have an Intel NUC NUC7CJYH.

I have Retroarch 1.9.6 installed and it works great, my goal is to just use a gamepad and run all the emulators.

I recently tried the PUAE Core; I used Turrican as a quick test to see if everything was ok, but unfortunately there was a lot of skipping and it was clearly struggling to run.

So I installed WinUAE and booted up the same game to see if it was a processor limitation; but the game ran fine.

I then tried Retrobat (Batocera that runs on top of Windows), this also uses Retroarch; the GUI for Retrobat has the core for Amiga set to PUAE. So I tried the same game and it ran fine.

So I was wondering if anyone knows why the same core runs fine in Retrobat, but runs poor in Retroarch?

I suppose I could use Retrobat just for Amiga emulation but it has other issues, plus I prefer Retroarch.

They are both using D3D11 as the driver.

#2

There are many, many variables that could be at play here, both from the core and the frontend.

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#3

I wonder if any amount of trial and error fiddling, e.g. trying different video modes etc. will fix it?

Just out of curiousity, could the menu driver effect performance in any of the cores?

#4

it shouldn’t but it’s possible.

you could try taking a retroarch.cfg from retrobat and compare it with your own to look for differences.

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#5

Thanks, I’ll try to see what’s going on :+1:

I also recently set up a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and the performance from that appears much greater than my NUC (it’s also really good for PS1), which I found surprising, but perhaps that’s because it is running Lakka? Or perhaps the cores are just optimized differently for the ARM processor :thinking:

#6

P-UAE is a lot slower than WinUAE. On an old PC that i have, PUAE runs 30-35 fps and WinUAE can do full speed with no vsync/legacy vsync/d3d9 almost at all times. If i use an older WinUAE like 2.0 it runs everything full speed. Some Retroarch cores have some serious speed issues on old and slow hardware like Hatari, which runs butter smooth as a standalone emulator. Not only on PC but on Android too, standalone Hataroid and UAE4All2 are full speed on old phones but Retroarch cores aren’t. Since i compiled a Hatari core for Wii some time ago i can tell you the core was using the latest and most accurate WinUAE 68000 core by default which was drowning Wii CPU and any CPU with less than 2.0-2.5 ghz, when i edited the source and choose old 68000 core for old PCs it compiled and run full speed on Wii which has a 700 mhz processor.

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#7

Has the core always been as slow as it is, or has some (recent or not) change made it slower?

I’m getting decent speed on my setup though, varying depending on the running software of course. But getting a big difference between frontends must be a configuration issue.

But indeed something seems to be crippling it, since with current WinUAE with the same settings (Normal CPU) I’m getting ~400 fps Fast Forward in Jim Power intro, but only ~240 fps with this core…

And when running nothing in Workbench, I’m getting ~1K fps with this core, but ~2K with WinUAE. Enough difference for some inspection. A big chunk of PUAE code is already on par with current WinUAE, but not the CPU emulation.

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#8

Thank you @sonninnos and @DariusG :+1:

I had briefly tried the PUAE core on my desktop, but that has a much faster processor and GPU and I hadn’t noticed any issues. I also hadn’t paid the core much attention in the past as I don’t think earlier versions supported save states :thinking:

But having recently discovered that it does I started looking into using it, so I don’t really have a comparison with how it would have ran on the NUC.

In a similar situation, I recently tried the DuckStation core on the NUC; this could barely get through the BIOS screen, but when running the standalone emulator it runs incredibly well.

I’m guessing there is something I’ve missed, possibly related to timing, that may be causing the lag in Retroarch.

#9

I believe something is going on with how retroarch handles sound too. Try disable sound (driver null)/ synchronisation/resampler. See if it improves. That gives a huge boost on old Android phones and Hatari core on Windows.

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#10

Thanks @DariusG :+1:

I was actually having issues with sound as the NUC is connected to the TV. The last update seemed to fix that, but I will try some different audio drivers, it may be that I switched to a different driver.