Mednafen PSX RA Core Settings?

[bujinkanrn]

Total noob here.  Could anyone suggest some settings for the software and OpenGL cores in Retroarch?  I've played around with 2x resolution in both cores, but I get SLOW audio if I go 4x or higher.  I'm not sure what general effect scaling, dithering, cropping, or shaders have, and I'm not sure how much slowdown they might cause.  My PC specs are as follows:

i7 990x, Win10 x64

24 Gb DDR3

GTX 980Ti

Particularly, I'm trying to get Chrono Cross looking nice with synced audio.  Any suggestions are much appreciated :-)

[Lordmonkus]

If you are going to upscale the resolution you want the hard ware PSX core, it's a separate core. The non hardware core does it in software and it is slow.

[bujinkanrn]

I've toyed with the HD core, but I seem to get worse slowdown with rendering set to OpenGL as opposed to software.  My guess is my settings are to blame.  Where is a good place to start?

[Lordmonkus]

I don't know where to tell you to start unfortunately, I don't use it myself since I have no need for it with the 2D sprite games I play on the PSX.

All I can say is mess around with it and if things go tits up just wipe out the hardware psx core config file and start over with it. Not a good answer I know but it's the best I got right now.

[bujinkanrn]

Thanks for your suggestions!  Wiping out the core config is where I'll start.

[Lordmonkus]

You should be able to get up to 3x or 4x native resolution with the hardware core though, keep in mind that shaders will look very different if you do go that high with the res.

[bujinkanrn]

After playing with Mednafen, I think my hardware may be starting to show its age.  Admittedly, I'm not experienced in tinkering with OpenGL.  With Mednafen's focus on accuracy, I'm sure it needs more juice to up-res on top of keeping everything running true to the original hardware.  Until I build a new PC, I may be stuck with epsxe.  Not a gripe, but something to keep on the radar for later on.

[Lordmonkus]

Your hardware has plenty of power to run it. I have an AMD 8350 @ 4 Ghz, 16 Gigs ram and a GTX 970 and I can run the hardware version of the PSX core at 3 or 4 time internal resolution.

Now having said that for upscaling 3D games I do prefer ePSXe, it just does a cleaner job of it. The hardware PSX core for Retroarch is still a WIP.

[bujinkanrn]

I tried moving RA, epsxe and Chrono Cross over to my SSD, and I got a considerable speed boost.  Apparently, an external USB 3.0 HDD still has considerable lag...funny, considering that nullDC, Demul, PCSX2, and Mednafen (for Saturn) all run from the HDD without lag.  Anywho, I'm sure we'll see improvement as Mednafen development continues.  Hope this helps others who are having lag issues.

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, bujinkanrn said:

Apparently, an external USB 3.0 HDD still has considerable lag

All of my roms are on an external USB 3 HDD and they work just fine. An SSD is certainly faster but the difference shouldn't be as significant as what you're describing. I feel like there's probably some other underlying issue at work there.

[DOS76]

I run my PS1 games from my server for one of my HTPC's that doesn't have a lot of storage space and they play over Gigabit LAN no issues. Now I've also tried this with some weaker hardware over WIFI and its a no go but in this case I"m not sure if the hardware is the issue or the network.

[Zombeaver]

35 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

I run my PS1 games from my server for one of my HTPC's that doesn't have a lot of storage space and they play over Gigabit LAN no issues. Now I've also tried this with some weaker hardware over WIFI and its a no go but in this case I"m not sure if the hardware is the issue or the network.

And I assume the NAS drives are mechanical right? If so, that's an even clearer indication - USB 3.0 is up to 5gbps transfer speed whereas Gigabit LAN is only 1gbps and only in the most ideal of conditions which probably no one will meet - in most cases you're probably looking at more like 400-500 mbps at best.

EDIT: In fairness, there's still the potential for bottlenecks in USB 3.0 transfers just like there are in a LAN scenario, but my point was that USB 3.0 itself isn't one of them. You're sooner run into issues with read/write speeds than you will with transfer rate.

[DOS76]

I have all mechanical drives on my Server but it isn't a NAS I have both a Windows Home Server 2011 and a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials box going in my basement the 2012R2E is a domain server and I use it to back up all of my PC's or at least I did before Windows 10 now I can't get the server to delete the Windows 8.1 clients and it won't add my new computers because they still have the same names as before. I have to get around to doing a clean install and adding all new clients or just updating to Server 2016 Essentials.

[Zombeaver]

Ah okay, gotcha.

Well my point was if you're getting sufficient speeds from a mechanical drive over a LAN there's no reason a mechanical drive connected directly through USB 3.0 should be insufficient for anyone. If switching to an SSD did the trick for bujinkanrn it did the trick, but I'm inclined to think it's more of a problem with the specific hard drive in question than anything to do with USB 3.0.