Very bad performance Tegra 4 (MC Mojo)

[Kristianity77]

Have't used PPSSPP for a while on Android. But when I last used it about a year ago an awful lot of games were running close to full speed on an old RK3188 device. I remember getting 60FPS out of Ridge Racer, and full speed out of games like Kingdom Hearts, Ghouls And Ghosts, Ys and Daxter to name but a few.

So anyway, I have a Mojo now which is a Tegra 4 (a reasonable upgrade to the RK3188 that was clocked at 1.2GHZ, the Tegra is 1.8GHZ) but I cannot get anywhere near playable speeds even with 1x rendering or messing with any settings.

Has PPSSPP gotten massively more power hungry in the past 12 months or so?

[LunaMoo]

Comparing to year ago we certainly have new effects that might be heavy. You can activate "disable slower effects" in graphics settings to make ppsspp closer to it's old buggy self, for many games it might not be a difference as psp games tend to use some effects without reason, by accident or whatever.

Either way comparing different hardware by clocks is misconception and in case of mobiles comparing by anything is unrealistic as in the end of the day even overally slower hardware working in similar way might end up with much better drivers that makes it faster.
I think also new android version was a reason for performance drop for quite a few people either due to system itself or worse drivers, this might also be a factor here.


If you're conviced ppsspp got much slower, you can still use ancient ppsspp builds from buildbot or previous release versions from official download page.
But again, the biggest difference here is simply you using different device, notice word "different" which does not equal to "better", it might be better at certain things, while worse at others. Ultimately using same ppsspp versions with same settings on both of those devices would be the only way of saying which of them is faster for psp emulation.

[TkSilver]

A few other difference makers between devices is

Screen Resolution (typically cheeper processors are paired with cheeper [lower resolution] screens)

Android "enhancements" (generally the further from stock you get the worse the penalties for design choices get)

Governor settings (if the kernal cpu managment your mojo is using is forcing the vast amount of processing on to the tegra 4's single low power core instead of using the more powerful quad cores then that could cause the massive performance issues).... and no this is not really something ppsspp can simply override and is more of a device issue then an emulator issue.

And other differences can make far more of a difference then 500MHz or even 1GHz of clock speed difference.

[[Unknown]]

It's also important that the Tegra 4 is just a different GPU. Most likely your performance is mainly restricted by your graphics speed, not your CPU Mhz.

The Rockchip had:
Mali-400 MP4 GPU, up to 600 MHz (typically 533 MHz)

The Tegra 4 has:
VLIW based, 672 MHz

That being said, Mali-400 is really not high on the list of recommended GPUs for PPSSPP, I would expect Tegra 4 to outperform it. I think the things pointed out by TkSilver and LunaMoo are likely the key reasons.

The slowest things that have been added recently are generally all bucketed into two different settings:

Simulate block transfer [X] - checked by default
Disable slow buffer effects [ ] - not checked by default

To have better speed, but graphical effect issues (which are the same ones from a year or two ago), swap those checkboxes - uncheck block transfer, and check the option to disable slower effects.

-[Unknown]