PPSSPP slowdown after some time on Mali

[[Unknown]]

It could just be that the graphical special effects during those times, especially with multiple in a row, overheat your device and make the safety kick in and underclock it to avoid running too hot.

Also, if it "clears it up" to save state and load state again, that might indicate that your device is running out of memory. Similarly, if it "clears it up" to task switch out of the app to another one and back, or turn off your screen for a few seconds, that might indicate that your GPU is running out of memory.

When we detect out-of-memory situations, our texture cache goes into low-memory mode, to try to avoid it. However, it doesn't always detect it, it's a best effort - if it fails to detect it you might even crash or get graphical glitches. But, if it does detect it, it's permanent until you restart PPSSPP iirc. And, it's also slower in low-memory mode.

Using "retain changed textures" will drink GPU memory like water, and texture upscaling at 2x will use four times as much (3x will use nine times as much.) Render resolutions are similarly exponential - 3x will use nine times as much GPU memory as 1x.

So you might also try at 1x with texture scaling definitely off (not sure any Mali-400 device can have texture scaling on and be playable anyway) and retain changed textures definitely off.

-[Unknown]