RetroArch Slow After Windows Upgrade

When running a 32-bit version of Windows 7 (Home Premium), while RetroArch didn’t play Beetle PSX HW at full speed at resolutions higher than 1x, it ran 1x and Beetle GBA just fine (provided the audio latency was properly set for each). Now that I’ve installed a 64-bit version of Windows 7 (Ultimate) to be able to use more RAM, while my computer and the RetroArch UI run much more smoothly, RetroArch has slowed to a crawl with both Beetle PSX HW & Beetle GBA. What could be the problem?

First thing to check would be the power consumption settings. Make sure everything is set to “max performance”

What settings would that involve? The Processor power management > Maximum processor state setting is set to 100% on battery & pluged in, and the Multimedia settings > When playing video setting is set to Optimize video quality. What else is there?

Here’s a log of me attempting to play Spyro the Dragon.

That log doesn’t show anything generally suspicious, except using the HW core with d3d11 means it’ll be falling back to software encoding, so internal res increases will be very expensive. The GPU overclock can also be very demanding, so I would probably check whether turning that down helps anything.

When the cores are going very slowly, if you hit the spacebar, do the cores speed up? If you look at your process viewer, is one of your CPU cores maxed out?

[libretro INFO] Checking if required firmware is present.
[libretro WARN] Firmware found but has invalid SHA1: C:\Users\Main\AppData\Roaming\RetroArch\system\scph5501.bin
[libretro WARN] Expected SHA1: 0555C6FAE8906F3F09BAF5988F00E55F88E9F30B
[libretro WARN] Obtained SHA1: 14DF4F6C1E367CE097C11DEAE21566B4FE5647A9
[libretro WARN] Unsupported firmware may cause emulation glitches.

Don’t know if this affects speed???

I checked Task Manager, and RetroArch is in fact not maxing out the CPU. In fact, it seems to be stuck below 50%.