False positive - you can not take anything for granted when it comes to Android performance - it’s a sucky non-realtime OS and it will run better or worse depending on the number of services that are running in the background. Best thing to do when you get performance issues is to restart your phone/tablet, turn off wifi, turn off some services or something along that nature.
Really, the problem lies elsewhere - and this is the big problem with Android - you can’t guarantee a stable runtime performance - it’s all dependent on what you have running in the background as a user and how your OS was configured. Making an OS based on Java with ‘native code’ running in a jail was a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE IDEA from a performance standpoint.
Another thing that will boost performance is to ‘disable’ overlays entirely. People want them ever more elaborate, so that means that system requirements will go up. After ‘adjustable scaling’ of overlays we are going to call it a day though - if people are still not satisfied by then, then they’re just going to have to learn how to make custom overlays - it isn’t hard, we tried making it as easy as possible, and if it’s still not easy enough, a user (kamui) is working on an overlay maker Android app which could hopefully fill the void.[/quote]
I disable overlays both iN R8 and R9, so I think the speed slowing down is not about overlays.[/quote]
There is nothing that got changed that should have made it slower.
EDIT: Are you using an Xperia Play? Because I’ve seen in a debug log that it uses a really bad refresh rate value that it reports to the OS - try to turn off ‘Sync refreshrate to screen’ and set ‘Custom refresh rate’ instead - set it to something like 59.95. See if that works better.
Same thing applies here right now as what I told the Galaxy S3 guys:
Yes - I explain it in the ‘RetroArch Manual’ PDF - your Galaxy S3 reports a ‘wrong’ refreshrate - it says that the screen is 60Hz but that’s not true - so you need to disable ‘Sync refreshrate to screen’ and start experimenting with the refresh rate - start at 59.95Hz and then go lower until you hit the sweet spot.
We’ll need to sort out the refresh rate problems with certain devices because vendors cannot be trusted to report the ‘real refresh rate’ of the screen to the Android OS. Xperia Play and Galaxy S3 are both examples of that where the manufacturer either ‘lies’ about the refresh rate of the screen or just plain gets it wrong. Note 2 gets it right though.