How's the performance on mobile phones for you?

[Ninty lover]

Hey everyone,

First things first, I'm using a nightly build at the moment, is there a way to donate directly to Paul or is the only way to give him money to download the paid version off the Play store?

With that out the way, I was just wondering what sort of performance you are all getting with your phones? I'm using a Galaxy S6 edge plus (unrooted) and I usually get around 20-30 FPS for most games. Is that about right? I get quite a few frame drops in a lot of games, which are a bit off putting. Games like the original Turok are generally stable at around 20-30, but there are frequent drops into the 10s which make it quite difficult to play.

I would guess that it's just a drawback of emulating N64 games on a mobile phone, but if everyone else gets better frame rates then I will have a good play around in the settings to see if I can get a more stable frame rate. I've read the FAQ for performance aswell, so I'll try some of those tips too if it will make a big difference.

Thanks!

[fzurita]

Try this build. It may help with your performance issues:

http://www.paulscode.com/source/Mupen64Plus-AE/AutoBuilds/Mupen64PlusAE_busywait_201601311403_01f3a2e.apk

[Dr_Bunsen]

What's different in the build you listed fzurita? I had performance issues on the later autobuilds on my Shield portable with regular drops to single digit framerates in Goldeneye (tried all options of emulator but the only the glide ones didn't glitch and were slow). I went to the last master autobuild of 2015 and have a fairly consistent 30 fps now. BTW I did try the build that had threaded sles audio, but it didn't seem to offload enough to help any with framerate.

[fzurita]

I'm not sure what changed in our end to increase performance. What video plugin are you using?

[Dr_Bunsen]

I generally use either GlideN64-GLES-2.0 or Glide64-Accurate since Gln64 and Rice both have major glitches like black sky etc. GlideN64-GLES-2.0 also glitches on gunfire sometimes in Goldeneye but it has the highest framerate.

I tried the build fzurita mentioned earlier and the performance is all over the map with framerates varying wildly from 15 to 40 fps. Music speed changes constantly and stutters too.

This build has much better performance: http://www.paulscode.com/source/Mupen64Plus-AE/AutoBuilds/Mupen64PlusAE_master_201512310907_7bc14f1.apk

[fzurita]

The busy wait build is a very old build and the changes in that build are obsolete. How does the 2015/12/31 master build compare to the latest build? From the messages here I'm confused about whether the latest is faster or the older one is faster.

[TimUpson]

Hello, new to the forum:

I am using the latest build from March 30. My interest is in speedrunning Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Important for that is a functioning Menu and connected to that the possibility to pause buffer frames with the pause menu.

My phone is a Huawei Mate S: Android 5.1.1

So far, the best performance is with GlideN64 Gles 2.0. But I have to set up a new profile, that actually has the same settings as the Built-In, but with the Built-In I get no textures inside Link's house for example.

Framerate seems pretty stable, but my question is, since I have seen that usually Gles 3.0 and 3.1 should have better performances, why is it that I get slower performance and a slower pause menu if I use them?

Is it just because my phone cannot handle them, even though it is Android 5+?

Anyway, I am really happy with Gles 2.0 so far and i can pretty consistently advance frames with the pause menu.

One thing I noticed though in comparison to the version from the Play store is that saving and loading slots takes a tad bit longer, any clue why that is? Is this connected to the plugin?

[fzurita]

From my experience, the GLideN64 GL ES 3.0/3.1 variants are slower because they are doing more operations. The newer GL ES has better capability so it can do more things to be more accurate.

I'm not sure why saving and loading slots is slower in the newer version. I believe the code for that hasn't changed. How much slower is it for you in the newer version?

[TimUpson]

Well beforehand after pressing the load state button the state was loaded like immediately, no delay really noticeable. Now after pressing the button, there is maybe a 1-2 seconds pause before I can resume play on the loaded state. That does not mean it pauses after loading the state, but it takes so long until it is loaded.

Also, before, there was no caption saying that the state is loaded/saved for the quicksave option, now there is.

[retroben]

Its normal for savestates on N64 to be sluggish because of how any Recompiler works when undeniably cached.
If you took a game that sustained full speed in pure interpreter at one moment with a savestate and load that savestate,it should load near instantly.

A confirmed example is a stable PJ64 build in pure interpreter loading a savestate.
It has to be an old enough version because savestates trigger a virtual memory error in newer versions oddly enough.

I am still really curious how fast recompiler would run without cache,if anyone can make a test build,I would greatly appreciate it.
I wish there was a way to have an uber-recompiler without caching that could have extra fast performance to compensate for no cache usage.
My example is that pure interpreter ran faster than a cached interpreter for some reason.

[Dr_Bunsen]

The busy wait build is a very old build and the changes in that build are obsolete. How does the 2015/12/31 master build compare to the latest build? From the messages here I'm confused about whether the latest is faster or the older one is faster.

The 2015/12/31 master build is faster and offers more consistent framerates than the latest builds. In Goldeneye, using GlideN64-GLES-2.0 and Glide64-Accurate the framerates varied wildly with regular drops to single digit, whereas 2015/12/31 is consistently at 30fps even with Glide64-Accurate which is the slower of the two emulators but fewer graphical glitches. In Conkers Bad Fur Day I had to drop to a lower resolution to prevent the framerate variation from tearing up the sound. 

[fzurita]

Could you narrow down to which build exactly slowed performance down for you? This would be highly appreciated. Is it anything after the 12/31 build?

[Dr_Bunsen]

I installed and tried a selection of "master" builds from this year and found the following, with Goldeneye (Glide64-Accurate original ratio) and Conkers Bad Fur Day (GlideN64-GLES 2.0 widescreen hack). Framerate is ok until after the 2016-02-29 build. Both games crash on builds between 2016-03-02 and 2016-03-11, then flickers and audio is torn from 20163-12 to 2016-03-17.  I tried 2016-03-20 and that crashed again. 2016-04-04 doesn't crash and seems reasonable framerate at the moment, so will try it for a while. Looks to me like the March builds were a problem at least for my NVidia Shield Portable.

[fzurita]

Ok, thanks a lot for this report. Hopefully whatever the issue was, it was put behind.

[fzurita]

It seems like the dates you described line up with different GLideN64 versions. So, there may have been some issues with the GLideN64 plugin during those "bad"dates.