RPi3 v33 beta issues

[Hew-ux]

• [x] Black levels on screen seem to be crunched. Is the driver sending out raw RGB instead of HDMI levels? Did not occur with previous dev builds nor stable v32. On a LG 4K TV using the HDMI port. batocera-resolution currentMode returns 0.0.1920x1080.60. The double 0. at the start seems unusual. One suspect might be the use of the current KMS driver, wasn't it Fake KMS earlier? It could be bug with KMS then. This can be worked around by manually renaming the input from something different than "PC". Edit: The double 0 is actually intentional, a recent change to the backend was done so that device output + driver is now shown instead of just output, warranting the extra information.
• [x] If the TV was off during boot-up, the screen will have a random defect. Of ones I’ve noted so far: screen gets scrunched up into lower-left corner, underscan occurs (cutting off the sides), random flashing when adjusting screen thereafter, audio becoming completely disabled. There may be more. Did not occur on stable v32.
• [x] Framerate when navigating ES’s menus is still below 30 FPS when using the Ckau-book theme. This however has been a long-standing issue since v31, so it may not be related to the beta directly. It could also be a bug with the theme itself. However, this theme ran at a full 60 FPS in v30, so it’s not just that it’s a heavy theme.
• [x] Poor emulator performance in general. Systems such as NES and GB are running at 50-40 FPS. Increasing the audio latency to 96ms did not make much of a difference. Switching over to headphone output did not make any difference either. Game tested with this: Tetris on the Game Boy. This is being caused by the bezels, somehow. Disable them, you get full speed again.
• [x] Attempting Scraper > Scrape Now causes EmulationStation to crash. Changing source has no effect. Scraping individual games from the game's options menu works successfully. Attempting after a reboot, it worked once. Reboot and try again, immediate crash. Reproduction conditions unknown, this is happening seemingly at random. When it does crash, EmulationStation closes immediately, no useful logs are created.
• [x] N64 and PSX cores other than the defaults fail to launch.

Support file attached (sensitive info scrubbed): batocera-support-20220124214116.tar.gz

[crcerror]

@Hew-ux Please try a resolution 720@60Hz, this will resolve your game stutterings. It's an awful attitude to think that some changes in libretro can improve the sound issues. In fact it's just the resolution. V33 is not better or worse than V32 in a nuthsell. The main issue you are reporting are the fact to change to 64bit and the change to the new video drivers.

What I hate since the last versions is the slowness during bootup. V31 took 30s to boot into ES, V32 and V33 are so slow.... ~45s (without splash) - this is caused by the new audio backend and makes the old speedup debatte laughable.

Are there other options? Well yes, you can turn back to RetroPie - I think regarding boot speed it's on par now. Other options? Recalbox? Uses the same modifications (in a nuthsell) and awful slow bootup! Maybe Lakka? Idk - never got in touch with this.

In the end? Well the main devs of v33 did a good job. Sadly only a single person still develops the little raspi SBCs

My wishlist? Well use the base sound drivers (ALSA) for bootup and the "advanced" stuff like ...(fit a backend here)... only for it's purpose like BT sound or x86 stuff. Then boot time will decrease much more. Complex? No ... Complicated? Maybe 🤣 More wishes? Yes ecwolf for SBC please

EDIT: This long text only hits point 4 of your list ;)

[crcerror]

Oh yes, I also did forget this thread: https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/issues/4709 🤣

[Hew-ux]

I was just trying out things as I remembered that pipewire previously caused slowdown when using headphone jack output. This was on all RPi platforms. My testing was to confirm that it is indeed a separate issue to that.

I'm also not complaining about any of this, just reporting it. I don't primarily use my RPi3 for playing Batocera, I have it just for testing.

I'll bring seeing in my own time what I can do to improve the performance of RPi3 back to what it was, but it may take me longer than v33 to do so.

[Hew-ux]

I have discovered the cause for the poor performance in all emulators: threaded video being off (edit: or bezels being shown). Ordinarily, this is not a requirement to run these games at full speed on the RPi3, but something has changed which seems to be dramatically consuming the resources of the single thread.

Disabling the simple bilinear shader improves performance to ~54 FPS in Game Boy games. Turning on threaded video restores performance completely back to a full 60 FPS.

Edit: I have also found out that disabling bezels also completely removes the slowdown. What to do...

[Hew-ux]

I have discovered the cause for the crunched black levels. I noticed that the Raspberry Pi no longer appears as "Roku" on my TV, but as "PC". I assume this causes the TV to switch to full RGB black levels instead of regular HDMI black levels, causing the crunch to happen (though logically it should do the opposite, fade out the colours... oh well). Manually naming the device to something other than "PC" for my TV has fixed it, however this option may not be available/accessible on all TVs. Thus, it should be either restored to what it used to be or otherwise fixed.

I noticed that the HDMI CEC in config.txt is already set to batocera, but changing that has no effect.

For clarification, on v32 and below, this device had always appeared as "Roku" on all TV sets (LG and Samsung) I tested it with.

[naddel91]

I have discovered the cause for the poor performance in all emulators: threaded video being off (edit: or bezels being shown). Ordinarily, this is not a requirement to run these games at full speed on the RPi3, but something has changed which seems to be dramatically consuming the resources of the single thread.

Disabling the simple bilinear shader improves performance to ~54 FPS in Game Boy games. Turning on threaded video restores performance completely back to a full 60 FPS.

Edit: I have also found out that disabling bezels also completely removes the slowdown. What to do...

has this been fixed in the final V33? or is the bezel performance problem still a thing?

[Hew-ux]

@naddel91 This has been addressed. Please check the original post for the check list of closed issues.

[jdorigao]

@Hew-ux Do any of the reported issues still occur in the current beta?

[Hew-ux]

Only the second point about the display size on boot. But honestly it's so minor I'd be okay with just closing the issue.

Assuming you can't reproduce it using the described instructions (because on my tv it happens consistently). Unfortunately don't have the exact hardware anymore.

Anyway there's a new issue where Batocera loses all audio output after exiting a game. I will investigate that at a later date.