MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Retroarch and mame speed difference

> > > > Yeah I'd want to know exactly what svn revision they were using and compare it
> to
> > > > that for a start. We've had plenty of changes recently that could slow things
> > down,
> > > > it might be that retroarch hasn't updated to that yet.
> > >
> > > Except that his point of consternation is that MAME is *faster* than Retroarch
> for
> > > ST-V games.
> >
> > I think he was also asking why some arcade games emulated with Retroarch + filters
> > were faster than MAME + HLSL.
> > As said elsewhere, anyway, Retroarch forks use several different MAME cores, going
> > from v0.36b, to v0.78, v0.139 and v0.150, so the difference in speed might very
> well
> > be due to some games being emulated with 0.36 or 0.78 (which in some cases would
> > leave more PC resources free for filters)
>
> So the core is automatically chosen by Retroarch depending on the game?
>
> I guess that's it.
>
> thx

No it isn't. unless you specifically selected 'Load Content (Detect Core)', and selected MAME 2010 or MAME 2003 instead of MAME when asked. But I'm pretty sure that is not the case here.

Anyway, the reason for most games performing faster on the libretro frontend than the official SDL version is most likely because libretro/RetroArch is just less resource intensive and just performs plain better - SDL is a jack of all trades, master of none when it comes to the performance stakes. While I don't want to speak ill of other people's efforts, our frontend drivers are definitely more optimal than you'd find in your average standalone emu. It will be very hard trying to beat RA there.

STV-games performing slower might be down to us improperly hooking up the OSD part. I don't know if STV-games do anything special or if it uses multiple work threads - maybe the problem lies there.

Retrowork.c/retrosync.c and retrorender.c should all be properly checked one day.

Lastly - libretro-mame tries to be more or less bleeding edge and there are actually NO speedhacks anywhere - no main code is modified in any way - it just uses an OSD libretro layer instead of the SDL one.

Edited by squarepusher (03/21/14 02:01 PM)