Use DirectX or GL API?

Having in mind that we’re on Windows platform, will all cores work better (don’t crash) if we just change our video driver to D3D? What about SDL2?

Emulators are coded in a different way than most apps, and I recall most PSX/PS2 emus used to run better with OpenGL plugins…

GL is generally better for RetroArch. if you switch to D3D or SDL2, you’ll have to first switch the menu driver to RGUI instead of the fancy XMB menu, and some Cg shaders won’t work correctly. GLSL shaders won’t work at all. Any cores that are “libretro-gl” will be nonfunctional, as well, including mupen64plus, glupen and ppsspp.

Other than those caveats, d3d works and is available for people that need it, which is usually really old GPUs with crummy OpenGL performance.

Depends. You can’t use any menu that uses gl or any shader that uses gl. But gl cores (mupen64plus, glupen64, mednafenpsxHW, etc.) do work under d3d, and in my case I have better luck with d3d than gl on a device with recent enough gl drivers (4.0+). Of course said device is a bay-trail windows tablet so YMMV.

Thanks a lot for the answer. Now I’m pretty sure GL is the way to go.