By timing in game tasks/cycles in both RetroArch and standalone PCSX2 it seems RA is running much slower than its framerate would suggest. This resulted in at least one game actually being unbeatable on RA.
This issue first occurred in RA PCSX2 core, but after updating to make this post, it also occurs in LRPS2 core (so I figured I would file here). No such problems on standalone PCSX2.
Expected behavior
I expect the number of frames for in game events/cycles to be constant so that the real time increases as the framerate decreases.
For example, a 600 frame event should take 10 seconds at 60 FPS or 12 seconds at 50 FPS.
As such, games should still be beatable even if they do not run at exactly 60 FPS.
Actual behavior
Timings and framerates to run down a long hall in God of War 1 for PS2:
Application
Real time
Reported FPS
Computed total frames
LRPS2
5.8 s
60
348
RetroArch
8.2 s
> 56
> 459
As you can see, the computed total frames are not close. This suggests that the core is not reporting the correct framerate, or perhaps something more complicated.
Practically, this means that timed in-game events are harder, and actually resulted in the inability to jump a gap in RetroArch (I assume due to reduced in game velocities), making the game unbeatable.
Steps to reproduce the bug
Run God of War 1 on PCSX2 core, time a cycle or in-game event and also record frame rate.
Run God of War 1 on standalone PCSX2 core, time the same in-game event and record frame rate.
Compute total number of frames needed for each application and observe the difference.
Version/Commit
RetroArch: 1.19.1 (git version: 0792144) via Flatpak
LRPS2 (alpha) (1.7.0)
Environment information
OS: Arch Linux
Caveat
I'm not a game or RetroArch developer, so this phenomenon could be expected and have a good math/physics reason for occurring which makes it inaddressable at the level of RA, but I hope you'll agree that this seems like undesirable behavior.
Description
By timing in game tasks/cycles in both RetroArch and standalone PCSX2 it seems RA is running much slower than its framerate would suggest. This resulted in at least one game actually being unbeatable on RA. This issue first occurred in RA PCSX2 core, but after updating to make this post, it also occurs in LRPS2 core (so I figured I would file here). No such problems on standalone PCSX2.
Expected behavior
I expect the number of frames for in game events/cycles to be constant so that the real time increases as the framerate decreases. For example, a 600 frame event should take 10 seconds at 60 FPS or 12 seconds at 50 FPS. As such, games should still be beatable even if they do not run at exactly 60 FPS.
Actual behavior
Timings and framerates to run down a long hall in God of War 1 for PS2:
As you can see, the computed total frames are not close. This suggests that the core is not reporting the correct framerate, or perhaps something more complicated. Practically, this means that timed in-game events are harder, and actually resulted in the inability to jump a gap in RetroArch (I assume due to reduced in game velocities), making the game unbeatable.
Steps to reproduce the bug
Version/Commit
Environment information
Caveat