I’m having some stuttering sound issues on Mednafen Saturn. Usually a game runs fine but in certain areas the sound stutters as if the hardware is struggling but gameplay seems to remain fine. It’s a small issue and I’m sure it’s just a problem due to the emulator being in it’s early stages, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to fix it in the settings.
I have a very powerful PC so it’s a bit surprising the only thing it struggles with is a Saturn game but hopefully there’s a workaround. Thanks.
Hi it’s an i7 with a GeForce GTX 1080. I’m not sure which sound settings I should be looking at - I tried different quality settings but there’s not much more to change. I’ve set graphics card to maximum performance (runs all modern games full speed). Do you think it could be a problem syncing the sound with the game? I think the core is the latest as I updated it.
Try turning Threaded Video on.
Threaded video is on. Noticed there is a drop in frame rate when it’s the stuttering sections so thinking that’s the problem but threaded video doesn’t solve it. Drops as low as 50 sometimes.
Try running with the process viewer open and see if, when the framedrops happen, one of your CPU cores is maxed out. If so, it’s just a matter of performance. If not, something else is afoot.
Do you have hard GPU Sync ON? If yes turn it OFF. I get stuttering sound on that core as well if i have this option ON, it’s a very demanding core for that.
Also, i have threaded video OFF and have no problems now, it’s all smooth.
there has been 2 releases for the standalone mednafen that’s specific for Sega Saturn updates. probably if mednafen_saturn_core will be updated to near upstream this will perform better.
Thanks I’ll try the process viewer. Performance seems to drop in the same places - it’s completely fine certain areas of the game but slows in others. I have an original Saturn and the games are fine on that so it’s probably not a flaw of the original game.
Yes I do have GPU sync on (set to 1) so will try turning that off as well as threaded video. If that doesn’t work I guess I’ll just have to wait until an update improves performance. It’s perfectly playable but would be nice if the issues get ironed out eventually.
OK I’ve been playing around a bit today and managed to improve the performance a little. I’m not sure what I’ve done but gpu sync and threaded video are back on (not sure if this is having a positive or negative effect as doesn’t seem to make much difference). Currently the games are more than playable, just a touch away from a real Saturn.
If anyone works anything out to get performance up then I’d like to hear it, but I’m thinking it might be a case of waiting for improvements to be made to the core.
I’ll chime in and say I don’t experience sound crackling or stuttering in any games I’ve tested in this core with an i5 2500k system with hard sync on, hard sync frames 1 and threaded video off. Anything newer than that I would think would be fine assuming you don’t have some background process stealing CPU cycles or a power setting throttling the CPU. The balanced Win10 power profile and default Nvidia (GTX 970, 378.66 drivers) power settings don’t throttle me.
I am overclocked to 4.4ghz, which might help in this case. I haven’t tested at stock. Mednafen’s documentation recommends:
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.