Sega Saturn emulation running slow?

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hi there !

I’ve been playing with Retroarch through multiple games and various cores since a couple of months now, I never had problems with any NES / SNES / Genesis / PSX games so far, so I wanted to try some Saturn emulation, but i’m running in some difficulties to have it working correctly.

I only have one single game to try and it’s Castlevania - Symphony of the Night, the japanese Saturn version. I have the correct bios and can boot the game with no problem, but framerate is quite unstable, both with Mednafen Saturn and Yabause too.The game runs between 35 / 40 fps, and barely goes above. I tried messing with my general configurations, disabling shaders, switching video parameters etc… Only thing that improved the framerate was to turn on the video threading option, i managed to go up to 50 fps but it’s very unstable and barely possible to enjoy playing the game with so many slowdowns.

I know that Saturn emulation is not as good as other most popular gaming systems, but I doubt it has trouble to run this game at full speed, am I right ? Am i doing something wrong with my configurations ? Both Yabause and Mednafen Saturn runs the game at equally slow speed… Any advice would be appreciated, thanks !

#2

It sounds like you’re not able to get full speed. What kind of CPU do you have? Also, if you have Hard GPU Sync enabled, try turning it off.

#3

Hi ! Some specs:

I5-750 @2,66ghz Nvidia GTX 670 DDR3 Mem, 8Gb

I know my CPU is getting old but I always had very smooth gaming and emulation experiences with it, able to play Dolphin and various accurate emulators with no slowdowns, I don’t think the problem comes from here ? I don’t have any specifics CPU-overclock software running too (at least, I have one usually on, but I tried with / without, no changes). I tried turning off the Hard GPU Sync, turning Hard GPU Sync Frames to 1 and various tricks i’ve read on the forum, no real improvements, and far from a stable framerate. I can post a log of my configuration if needed.

#4

I have a Nehalem i7 at work and it doesn’t get full speed, either, IIRC, though I can just barely get full speed with my Sandy Bridge i7 laptop. I would suggest running RetroArch in a window and check your process monitor to see if one of your cores is pegged at 100%.

#5

Quoted from Mednafen’s documentation: “Mednafen’s Sega Saturn emulation is extremely CPU intensive. The minimum recommended CPU is a quad-core Intel Haswell-microarchitecture CPU with a base frequency of >= 3.3GHz and a turbo frequency of >= 3.7GHz(e.g. Xeon E3-1226 v3), but note that this recommendation does not apply to any unofficial ports or forks, which may have higher CPU requirements.”

My overclocked desktop Sandy Bridge gets fullspeed on every game I’ve tried with hard sync frames 1, but fast forward barely speeds it up for most games so there’s not much overhead left over.

#6

I tried messing around a bit more, checking the process monitors as you suggested, with my usual configuration, my CPU goes a bit higher than with Mednafen PSX for example, one of the cores goes to 80% use but not much more, maximum 85%, other ones are at 60% use, seems normal I think. I tried some soft overclocking on my CPU to see if I could get a better result, I managed to reach full speed but once again, quite unstable …

So the problem is indeed CPU related ? Not enough power on mine ? I’m quite surprised both Mednafen and Yabause requires so much performance for decent emulation, I’m really not used to Saturn emulation so perhaps it has always been like that, I dunno honestly, i’m surprised. Curious to know the specs of people managing to get stable framerate with these cores, for my understandings of Saturn emulation. Overall, Mednafen seemed to run the game at a better framerate… Thanks for the help anyway ! I’ll keep checking this topic and various updates, i’ll let you know if any evolution is perceived on my side. :slight_smile:

EDIT: didn’t see the above post at the moment I was writing this. That explains my slowdowns then, quite clear. I guess Yabause needs a similar configuration then ?

#7

Try out SSF. It used to run fullspeed on my potato laptop.

#8

Got an i5-3570K at 4Ghz oc Turbo that’s working fine.

#9

Yabause is the worst. I couldn’t run it at full speed on my i5 4670 even with all the stuff turned off (like GPU Sync). The only way to run it at “full speed” was with frameskip, but you realize this doesn’t really count as full speed, it would just allow the audio to not crackle. And it wasn’t even as good or accurate as SSF. Ridiculous. Mednafen Saturn runs full speed thankfully with GPU sync at “1” (can’t handle “0”). But it has very high input lag compared to other cores.

I’m pretty sure your problem is your CPU. Mednafen requires better IPC and slightly faster speed than 2.66 Ghz. As for Yabause, just forget it, it probably requires a cluster supercomputer (unless you run the standalone in GL mode).