vSync issues with many, if not most cores

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hello! Firstly, I would like to say that I am newish to using RA. I have used it for maybe 2-3 months now and am having a few annoyances that I hope is just me not knowing what the heck I am doing here.

[ol] [li]vSync does not seem to be working at all in most of the RA cores. Most notably, 4DO core, Lynx core, several SNES cores, Nestopia core and several others I can’t recall off the top of my head. OpenGL, Vulkan, and SDL all have the exact same issue and through a lot of googling and such I have found no fix that works at all.[/li][li]The one and only way the vSyncing seems to work is to use D3D but then the XMB prettiness won’t work AND it crashes many cores like the Mupen core.[/li][/ol]

So, really the question is, how do you force vSync to work when it refuses to. RA seems to ignore forced driver settings but many other games and all of the standalone emulators I use have no problem enabling vSync, including when I am using OpenGL. If this cannot be made to work then is there a way to use the fancy XMB stuff with D3D? Or alternatively, is there any kind of UI that actually works with D3D?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide advance.

#3

when you say vsync doesn’t work, what behavior are you actually seeing? Are the cores running too fast? are you getting frame-stutters? tearing?

#4

@hunterk I do apologize for not being as specific as I should have been. What happens is massive screen tearing. To the point that I can’t play the games.

It seems to me that some cores work fine while others do not and this is what is confusing me so much. I have been under the impression that RA itself handles all of the video output itself in a common way and that the core retains control over mainly the emulation itself.

Of course, I can always just use a standalone emulator instead but I do like how RA supports so many systems, some of which the standalone versions of the emulators are not nearly as good overall.

I also neglected to post my specs so I will post those now in case there is some known configuration issue I am not aware of. CPU i5 6600K @4.5Ghz | R9 380 Factory OC @ 1010Mhz | Windows10 Pro x64

Thanks again for the help! :smiley:

#5

That’s correct.

Does it tear in both fullscreen and windowed? If it tears during fullscreen, is it set to use windowed fullscreen (in settings > video)?

#6

[QUOTE=hunterk;49407]That’s correct.

Does it tear in both fullscreen and windowed? If it tears during fullscreen, is it set to use windowed fullscreen (in settings > video)?[/QUOTE]

It does not tear in windowed mode, only in fullscreen and it also makes no difference if it is set to Windowed FS or not. I assume the difference is exclusive FS and non-exclusive FS? If it were a fullscreen window, you would expect it to not tear if it does not tear in normal windowed mode but unfortunately, it tears with in either case.

#7

Windows 8+ forces vsync in windows and handles it through their compositor, so that’s probably why it works there. My guess is that it’s related to AMD’s OpenGL implementation in the driver. Which driver are you using? The lastest from their site?

#8

Yeah, I am using 16.10.1. Thing is, nothing else seems to have any issues with vSync or tearing. It is also not on all cores, or so it seems to me. If I were to use D3D, is there a way to get the GUI to work properly or even an alternate GUI that works with D3D?

#9

RGUI is the only one that works with D3D, unfortunately.

#10

Well, that certainly is unfortunate. I think RA needs to make the other GUI workable in D3D, not just for me but that would be a good move for everyone I think. There must be some other way to stop the tearing since pretty much everything else, even emulators work fine with my setup I just can’t believe that is is exclusively the video drivers fault. I mean, I will be the first one to blame AMD for driver shenanigans since they have real problems with some of their OpenGL stuff but in this case, I doubt it. I would be willing to bet money that RA is just expecting it to behave in a very specific way and it isn’t. I would hate for this to be a reason why I choose to go with another emulator for everything but I have not given up entirely. This kind of thing is not uncommon from what I have seen in my googling and it must not be good for the project if it is a relatively common problem.

If you can think of anything, anything at all that might help here, please let me know. I have even gone so far at to reformat and reinstall windows but even that didn’t help any. I am open to suggestions. :frowning: