Desktop PPSSPP performance comparison

[LemonTree]

Tested on Ubuntu 13.04 64 bit on a game that can't reach 60 VPS on my system
(the name of the game is meaningless; the test was performed at the title screen (so that I could repeat it more easily)):

Wine (Windows32 release via a Wine32 prefix (NOT via the default Wine64 prefix!))
VPS: 46-48 (with both 1x and 2x zoom)
FPS: 155

Wine (Windows64 release (via the default Wine64 prefix))
VPS: 44-45 (with both 1x and 2x zoom)
FPS: 155

Native (ppssppQt.pro compiled by me on Ubuntu64)
VPS: 60 with 1x zoom (best result ever).
VPS: 37-39 with 2x zoom (worst result ever). (OK my GPU is old and weak (Nvidia GT 120), but is scaling the screen that expensive? And why 2x zoom is faster using Wine?)
FPS: 155-156

I was not shocked at all by the first two results (and I guess the Windows32 release runs slightly faster on a Windows32 OS than the Windows64 release on a Windows64 OS with the same hardware too: I'm not sure who wins on the same Windows64 OS, though):
it may be caused by the fact that the 32bit dynarec is faster.

The third result looks strange to me: what is causing the performance drop with 2x zoom ?
And if that depends on my GPU, it shouldn't behave better under Wine, should it?
And why there is almost no performance drop between 1x and 2x zoom under Wine ?

Further details:
I haven't tested the SDL version so far.
I've used "FBO active" in all my tests (but this is not significant).
The presence (or the absence) of the atrac3 decoder was uninfluential.
The "Use Media Engine" option is no more present in current versions of PPSSPP AFAIK (and this choice makes some games unplayable),
but the media engine is not responsible for the results of my tests.

[[Unknown]]

What games are hitting problems without "use media engine"? We'd rather fix those games.

The FPS indicator is "emulated FPS." If your VPS is 10.0, but the game is not internally skipping frames, it would still show e.g. 30.0 or 60.0. The same would be true if you fast-forwarded and got 500.0 VPS or anything.

So, it's actually relevant that the game gets ~155 FPS, because that means it's buggy. What game is it? I'd like to add it to the list of games that have this bug where they render > 60 FPS (which aren't even all displayed of course, so they're just wasting time.) In the vast majority of cases, this doesn't happen on the PSP.

2x zoom should quadruple the number of pixels you're rendering. Maybe Wine is using software, but doing it efficiently? Or maybe your settings are slightly different (linear filtering, SSAA, etc.)

-[Unknown]

[LemonTree]

What games are hitting problems without "use media engine"? We'd rather fix those games.

I think it's more than one game. For sure Lemmings works only without Media Engine enabled, but other games might crash on their starting video as well (to test: Assassin Creed).

What game is it? I'd like to add it to the list of games that have this bug where they render > 60 FPS (which aren't even all displayed of course, so they're just wasting time.) In the vast majority of cases, this doesn't happen on the PSP.

GOW-COO (I thought I needed a game that did not reach 60 frames per second to do the testing).

2x zoom should quadruple the number of pixels you're rendering. Maybe Wine is using software, but doing it efficiently? Or maybe your settings are slightly different (linear filtering, SSAA, etc.)

Not that I can think about... anyway in games that reach 60 VPS, I usually can scale the screen to 4x without losing performance. This is really weird . I'll keep using Wine for now, since it's faster for me with zoom > 1x (BTW: PPSSPP really rocks under Wine and this doesn't happen frequently with other emulators. What is the secret?).

-[Unknown]
[/quote]

[[Unknown]]

Someone had told me I fixed Lemmings so it played videos fine. It's broken again?

Gears of War specifically has problems, it renders too many frames. It's a bug and makes it slower than it should be. The "FPS" number is the number of FPS the game is trying to do - it's per emulated second (e.g. if you fast forward, the number won't change.)

VPS is a measure of how fast your system is processing it. So if that goes above 60 VPS (as with holding tab on Windows, for example, or toggling on unlimited mode), then the FPS will stay constant but it will render more frames per observed "wall clock" second.

Probably OpenGL is the secret. Our Windows code is pretty lightweight. Also, it's the only way you get a MIPS debugger so running well in Wine is a good thing.

-[Unknown]

[solarmystic]

Someone had told me I fixed Lemmings so it played videos fine. It's broken again?

Gears of War specifically has problems, it renders too many frames. It's a bug and makes it slower than it should be. The "FPS" number is the number of FPS the game is trying to do - it's per emulated second (e.g. if you fast forward, the number won't change.)

VPS is a measure of how fast your system is processing it. So if that goes above 60 VPS (as with holding tab on Windows, for example, or toggling on unlimited mode), then the FPS will stay constant but it will render more frames per observed "wall clock" second.

Probably OpenGL is the secret. Our Windows code is pretty lightweight. Also, it's the only way you get a MIPS debugger so running well in Wine is a good thing.

-[Unknown]

That's quite the achievement right there.

[[Unknown]]

Err, God of War I mean, of course. Oops.

-[Unknown]

[LemonTree]

Someone had told me I fixed Lemmings so it played videos fine. It's broken again?

I think so (at least the European version, but I don't think it's any different).

Probably OpenGL is the secret. Our Windows code is pretty lightweight. Also, it's the only way you get a MIPS debugger so running well in Wine is a good thing.

Good. On a side note, when I first used PPSSPP under Wine, the sound was lagging heavily: then I (someway... please don't ask me how) changed the Wine sound driver from "winealsa.drv" to "winepulse.drv" and all the sound problems disappeared (I write it here because it might help somebody...).

P.S. Thanks for your answers .

[[Unknown]]

If you could try a few builds or do a git bisect for the Lemmings issue, it'd definitely help to know which build it last worked in and which one it stopped working in.

-[Unknown]

[LemonTree]

If you could try a few builds or do a git bisect for the Lemmings issue, it'd definitely help to know which build it last worked in and which one it stopped working in.

I'm not an expert of git, but the problem here is that as far as I remember, I've never seen it working with the Media Engine enabled; so I guess that: or it's something related to the (USA-EU-JP) version, or it's something with Wine not having a particular decoder. Maybe somebody with a real Windows OS should try it and see if it's working.

I prefer using Wine for testing Media Engine issues rather than native PPSSPPQt, because I can see many more PPSSPP videos using it (don't know why, maybe I should simply install more decoders inside Ubuntu...).