Hi everyone. I asked a similar question in the MAME forums a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't got any responses. I'm hoping someone here may have some advice.
I'm seeing performance issues (slowness, audio stuttering) when enabling HLSL and bezels at the same time, but only at a specific resolution, or when hooked up to a TV instead of a monitor. My monitor's resolution is set to 2560x1440. If I enable HLSL, but bezels are off, I don't have any issues with any games that I've tried. Everything works well. Similarly, if I turn HLSL off and turn bezels on, I have no issues. The sweet spot seems to be setting my monitor to 1920x1080, then I can turn HLSL and bezels on and have no issues. I'm only having these issues when HLSL is enabled, bezels are turned on, and my monitor resolution is set to 2560x1440.
My question is, is there some setting that I have wrong in my mame.ini file, perhaps in the OSD PER-WINDOW VIDEO OPTIONS section, that would allow this to also work when set to 2560x1440? It was my understanding that HLSL can put a lot of work on the graphics card, but like I said above, it handles it fine when bezels are off. I didn't think turning bezels on would affect the performance. Is it likely that bezels affect performance just enough to only matter at that specific higher resolution? I get that that wouldn't be unheard of, but I'd like someone who knows more about this stuff to confirm for sure. For some reason I feel like this is just a settings issue or conflict that I'm missing somewhere and can't figure out. I realize I don't need my monitor set to anything above 1920x1080, so I'm fine with this limitation. I'm just looking to better understand what's going on with the resolution/screen/view/layout settings, so that if I need to make adjustments to work with whatever display I'm using, I can do so effectively. Maybe it's a botched setting in an .ini or .lay file?
Just recently, I tried hooking my PC up to a TV. I'm seeing performance issues there, even if my display settings in Windows is set to 1920x1080. Big Box runs smooth, but if I launch a MAME game and have HLSL on, things get sluggish. Refresh rate is set to 60. Is there something else I should be looking at or tweaking? This is a 4k TV, but like I said, I have the Windows display settings resolution set to 1920x1080. Does it seem weird that everything would work fine when hooked up to a 2k monitor with the resolution set to 1920x1080, but a 4k TV with the resolution set to 1920x1080 would cause issues? I'm trying to figure out if this is a settings issue or an issue of my PC or graphics card being under powered.
Anyone have any ideas or thoughts? Help is much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy post.
My current specs are as follows:
MAME 0.240
Monitor: 2560x1440, 144Hz
Intel i5-4590 CPU 3.30GHz
16 GB RAM
256GB SSD
Windows 10 Pro
NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (low profile D4 2G)