HLSL and Bezels with MAME

[rh1nomyt3]

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)
 

[Lordmonkus]

Sounds like your video card isn't powerful enough to run the shaders at higher than 1080p resolution, a 1030 is not a particularly powerful card, especially if you don't the version with the DDR5 vram on it.

[Your Friendly A.I Overlord]

1 hour ago, rh1nomyt3 said:

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.

1 hour ago, rh1nomyt3 said:

NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 (low profile D4 2G)

Entry level cards are really meant for desktop use. My guess is that with BigBox running + Mame HLSL + bezels in 1080p, 2 GB of video memory is not enough. Maybe check that ingame your are still outputting 1080p60, and not 2160p30. Also update your Nvidia drivers to the latest version and in the Nvidia Control Panel > "Manage 3D Settings" > "Program Settings" add mame.exe > set "Power Management Mode" to "Prefer Maximum Performance". But if you have a more powerful videocard lying around to test with, check if the framerate improves.

Edited June 12, 2022 by Your Friendly A.I Overlord

[rh1nomyt3]

Thanks for the quick responses! I took your advice and went in to the Nvidia Control Panel to make the changes you recommended. Since I had to add mame.exe to set the Power Management Mode, I also set the "Select the preferred graphics processor for this program" to "High-performance NVIDIA processor" (It was defaulted to the integrated graphics option). Happy to report that everything is working smoothly now, with my resolution set to 1080p! Working on both my TV and monitor, with HLSL and bezels. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions! I tried setting my monitor back to 2560x1440 after this fix just to see if it was better. It definitely performs better, but still not smooth. At 1080p, the GPU is anywhere between 50-60%. At 2k, it goes up around 90-95%. I'm ok with that though, as I don't need the resolution set that high. 1080p will work just fine. HLSL, bezels, and I've even got it outputting a marquee to a second monitor. I'm sure I'll need to upgrade to a beefier system at some point, if I want to get into more recent console emulation, but for now, with MAME and some older consoles, it seems to be working pretty well.

I got the LaunchBox Premium with lifetime updates. I just started getting into all this a couple of months ago. These forums have been a big help! Thank you!!

[Jsupstarz]

Same issue stuttering audio and game play lag did all max performance for mame via nvidia panel only utilizes 16% gpu while playing and 1%cpu.  No god damn clue now