Poor emulator performance unknown

[nlen83]

Please forgive me if this has come up before, but I could not find it anywhere. I absolutely love this whole system and have been working way too often trying to make something cool for the family. My problem is, I may have OCD so I am really trying to create professional results.

Here we go... I have run in to similar issues with HyperSpin in the past, but hadn't noticed anything until I hit the Dreamcast generation with big box. Old school all works flawless with big box etc. HOWEVER, I have been tweaking Demul on a per game basis with internal res etc and have everything lined up nicely OUTSIDE of big box. When I go to play the games in big box however, I believe the CPU drag has a tremendous impact performance for an emulator like this. It goes from 60 FPS and stunning to all sounds coming out like the system just had a stroke and not being playable anymore. 

My question is: Is there a way to fix this? I am about to try a CPU priority tool to permanently set demul etc to a HIGH priority over big box. My thought being that emulators launching from big box will take priority all the sudden and run to their potential.

OR is there a way to kill the big box process on game launch and have it reload after an emulator such as Demul is exited?

Thanks to everyone in advance!

Nick

 

[Lordmonkus]

If you can provide some more information on your computer like the CPU, GPU, RAM and operating system that might help some.

I cannot say that no one has ever reported similar behavior but it is very rare. I have not noticed any performance loss in any emulator due to BigBox and I run it on a couple of systems ranging from a moderately decent gaming PC to a 10 year old PC with a somewhat okish GPU in it (not on board video).

I just did a quick test to see how much CPU was being used by BigBox while running Demul and as you can see in the attached screencap it is using very little CPU resources.

Although we have a thread dedicated to tweaks that you can use to improve the performance of BigBox itself there may be some tips there that can help increase your systems performance overall alleviating your issues.

 

[nlen83]

Wow, I see what you mean. I wonder why this is happening...now I really have no idea. OO My PC is Mid-High end,

Windows 10
6700K
16GB of Ram
GTX 980
500GB Evo SSD

[ckp]

You should have 0 problems with your specs. So, if you open task manager on top of Bigbox before you even launch a game, how much cpu usage is showing for bigbox.exe?

Then sort the cpu column so highest usage is at top. What is taking the most cpu and how much?

I have a hard time believing BB is tanking your FPS and system.

Also, is it the same issue when launching from Launchbox.exe?

 

[ckp]

You might also want to paste screenshots of your Demul emulator tabs in LB Manage Emulators as well as screenshot tabs for one of these games.

[nlen83]

Thank you so much for getting back to me. When I lower the internal resolution to 3X instead of 4X, all is good. CPU usage is all good showing next to nothing with things closed, about 1% with big box and nothing major with Demul. Just now in demul, 4X was NOT GOOD outside of bigbox....so I have no idea.... gonna play around with this but this should not be a big box specific problem at this point. So sorry. Tips and ideas are always appreciated though!

[chglcu]

I don't know if it's still the case, but a while back (months ago), BigBox's background CPU usage was quite a bit higher when using VLC instead of Windows Media Player for videos. I was having problems using some of the more complex RetroArch shaders smoothly until I changed that option.