Overclocking...

General chit-chat about what's hot and not in the land of emulated video games.

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FrizzleFried
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Overclocking...

Post by FrizzleFried » Wed Jan 03, 2018 3:39 am

Has anyone played around with overclocking the Pi3 and what kind of benefit would be obtained from say a 100mhz overclock, etc?
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Re: Overclocking...

Post by dee2eR » Wed Jan 03, 2018 5:53 am

I haven't done much overclocking on Pi3 but you will want to add a heatsink to the main chipset if you're overclocking, RPi3 can be pretty borderline for cooling at stock speeds (it's generally ok if you don't put it in a case though). I doubt you'll find a massive gain in performance in MAME but would love to hear your results if you try.

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Re: Overclocking...

Post by FrizzleFried » Tue Jan 09, 2018 5:00 pm

FWIW ... I'm able to overclock from 1200mhz to 1350mhz without active cooling rock stable all day long (admittedly, the garagecade is a crisp 60 degrees or so though). I can run at 1450mhz for a while but heat builds... though I suspect with active cooling it would probably maintain 1450mhz with little trouble.

I also overclocked the memory from 450mhz to 500mhz as well as the graphics speed from 400mhz to 500mhz.

Does it help? I think it does. I don't have a way to benchmark unfortunately but games that struggled seem a little less choppy. Some of the cave games play just a little smoother. Etc...

If anyone has a suggestion for a benchmark I could run... let me know.
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Re: Overclocking...

Post by dee2eR » Wed Jan 10, 2018 4:31 am

Sounds like you're getting good results so far. Mind trying Taito F3 games in AdvMAME 0.94 and regular AdvMAME? They're so close to full speed and I'd love to play Bubble Bobble 2 and 3 without the occational slowdown (it's really bad on bonus stages, otherwise 94 is pretty playable at stock clock speeds on Pi3 but not perfect).

In game (in MAME) F11 on keyboard shows the performance in the top right. There's some command line way to do it too I think, but I don't know it. You really need to play the games to tell as sometimes the issues aren't obvious until later in games (or in bonus stages, cutsceens, etc.).

Mildly off topic, the same playing while testing thing applies to figuring out what version of MAME performs best for a certain game. For example: in early MAME releases (like MAME4All) Snowbros has a bug where it freezes at level 30, FBA runs it at the wrong speed so is obviously wrong without playing much at all (so I'm not sure if the level 30 bug is in FBA), it plays great in AdvMAME or 172 though (and is fullspeed in 192 but I haven't played a full game yet).

EDIT:
back on topic CPS2 games run very slightly worse in 192 than they do in 172 (pretty flawless in 172) and the harder to run titles could also make a reasonable overclocking test. Also NEOGEO stuff is close but not quite in 172 and 192 and could be worth a look.

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Re: Overclocking...

Post by FrizzleFried » Thu Jan 11, 2018 12:21 am

I'm on a vertical rig... any vertical games you'd suggest? I've been using the usual Cave shooters primarily...
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Re: Overclocking...

Post by dee2eR » Thu Jan 11, 2018 1:36 am

Try Spacies 95, it's a vertical game on Taito F3 hardware (so is Rayforce aka Gunlock). 19xx is a vertical CPS2 game. As far as I know the only vert NEOGEO games are not emulated due to still being sold by the manufacturer so can't help there.

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Re: Overclocking...

Post by FrizzleFried » Fri Jan 12, 2018 8:25 pm

Both games play fine...however it appears that Gunlock has some screwed up sprites. The right most 10-15% of the sprite appears as the first 10-15% of the sprite at the left...

I've not tried moving the ROM to another emulator yet.
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Re: Overclocking...

Post by FrizzleFried » Sat Feb 03, 2018 3:08 pm

I've been running rock stable at the following settings for going on 5 days now. It was almost stable with the power setting down to 3 but I got a hiccup after a couple days so I bumped it to 4. I could probably squeeze 25-40 more mhz out of the CPU clock but it's probably not worth the effort...

Currently I am running crappy little aluminum heatsinks attached with crappy ole heat-tape. I will be upgrading to thermal paste/glue and a larger heatsink shortly. I will say that the heatsink does get a bit toasty... but not so hot you can't touch it...

arm_freq=1350
over_voltage=4
sdram_freq=550
core_freq=550
gpu_freq=550
temp_limit=80 #Will throttle to default clock speed if hit.
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Re: Overclocking...

Post by FrizzleFried » Thu Feb 15, 2018 9:55 pm

OK... still rock stable at the above settings. Here are some benchmark results...

Code: Select all

NAME		STOCK SPEED		OVERCLOCK		AVERAGE %
19XX		150-195 (170 average)	179-225 (190 average)	+10.53%
1941		170-225 (190 average)	200-260 (225 average)	+15.56%
Dimahoo		140-165 (155 average)	160-195 (170 average)	+08.83%
Donpachi	115-210 (125 average)	130-240 (145 average)	+13.08%
Qbert		320-345 (330 average)	380-410 (390 average)	+15.39%
Thundercade	135-190 (145 average)	160-215 (165 average)	+12.13%
I am overclocking from 1200mhz to 1350mhz (+11.12%). I am also increasing the memory speed from 450mhz to 550mhz (+18.19%) and my GPU speed from 400 to 550 (+27.28%). I'm not quite bored enough to go back and forth from the garagecade to the PC to determine how each setting plays a part in the overall overclock... at least not right now... but it's nice to see that my "imagined" improvement wasn't so "imagined"... I am, right now, running Donpachi at full speed for an hour to see if it gets throttled or not (if so, I should see a significant drop in the average framerate)...
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Re: Overclocking...

Post by splashwave » Sat Mar 31, 2018 8:07 am

Hey guys, i have only just started overclocking my setup and wanted to share some of my results.
If your running any games that are only dropping a few frames its definitely worth your while....

Im running my pi3 at

arm_freq=1450
over_voltage=6
sdram_freq=550
core_freq=550
gpu_freq=550

Tetris - the grand master 2 is one game id like running at full speed so i am using that as a reference at the moment.

Average title screen fps, stock vs o/c fps :)
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