Hi everyone. I’m kinda sick of the performance and compatibility on my 3rd gen iPad so I’m thinking about getting an Android tablet to use Retroarch flawlessly with the mupen64plus core. I saw this tablet; the Cube Talk 9X and it caught my attention because it’s very cheap and well speced (octa core, 2 GB RAM, “retina” display). Unfortunately, I don’t have enough rupees to purchase an Nvidia Shield or a Samsung Galaxy Tab and I was wondering how is Retroarch performance on Android octacore or quadcore devices running the most demanding cores and the ease of use of my iPega 9025 bluetooth controller
As is generally the case with emulators, single-threaded performance is all that matters, rather than number of cores.
That tablet has a cortex A7 CPU, which is significantly (approximately 50%) slower in single-threaded performance as compared with a cortex A15, like what’s in a shield. Performance per watt will be much, much better, though, such that you could expect ~5x longer battery life under full load.
The upcoming nexus 9 would probably be a good choice, but it’s going to cost like 2x as much as a shield, so probably not something you’d be interested in.
Thank you very much for this information. I decided to order it and give it a shot, I will post results ASAP. And you’re right, the new Nexus may be better but its well above my budget.