Retroarch Settings

Retroarch is an easy program to get up and running but getting it fine tuned to be at it's best can be more tricky especially with all the different settings. I am going to go through what I think are the most important settings to get the best performance out of Retroarch to boost your enjoyment of playing your games. There are other settings but I don't feel they are that important to getting up and running or they are for more specific occasions. These are also the settings that I have found that work best on my setup and your setup may require some other settings. I use just a basic 60hz Samsung (non-gaming) monitor.

As of me writing this the latest official build of Retroarch is 1.3.0.
Here is a link to an example retroarch.cfg file and description of all the different settings. https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/RetroArch

The first settings you should be looking at are in the Video section of the Settings tab.

• For testing purposes turn on "Display Framerate", while playing you want your games to be running at a constant 60 frames per second.
• Aspect ratio should be set to Core provided or Custom depending on your personal preference. Personally I use core provided but Custom is just fine too but then adjust the Custom Viewport Width and Height settings to adjust the screen size to what you like. Start out by setting each number at it's lowest setting then bump up each by one til you get what you want.
• Integer Scale is another personal preference and I use this with Core Provided aspect ratio. This setting however will give you black bars across the top and bottom of your game. This setting scales the game image at equal steps. The purpose of this is to maintain the proper aspect ratio at bigger sizes. If you leave this setting set to off with "Custom" aspect ratio when you adjust the Viewport Width and Height you will either get black bars or your screen will probably just slightly be larger than the height of your screen. Integer Scale set to "On" is my recommendation if you choose to use some sort of shader which uses scanlines. With it off your scanlines may look a little off.
• HW Bilinear Filtering is a personal preference, basically this just adds a slight blur to the output image. I like this one on to help break up the sharp pixels but it is purely personal taste, try them both and you decide.
• Threaded Video should be left off if you can help it but if you are running on a low end system and you need to squeeze out a little bit more performance you can turn this on but off is preferred.
• Vsync is another setting that should be left off when possible. Off can cause some screen tearing depending on your display but the downside to having it set to "On" is it can cause some input lag which is something no body wants. Turn Vsync on only if your screen tearing is really bad and you can live with some input lag.
• Hard GPU Sync is an amazing setting, just leave this set to "On". This is a feature that drastically reduces input lag. Input lag = bad.
• Frame Delay is another setting that can help with input lag. Set this as high as you can before getting audio distortions like crackling or a frame rate hit. 0 is an ok setting but higher than 0 is better but don't go too high.
• Crop Overscan should be set to On. What this does is it crops a few pixels off the image output which on an old fashioned CRT would be hidden by the bezel but on new wide screen displays and using the Integer Scale setting above you may see. You don't want to see those garbage pixels do you ?

That should be it for the Video section so now we move on to the Audio section where there really isn't too much to mess with here but you should set your Audio Latency to as low as possible without hearing crackles in your sound. The best thing to do here is set the latency all the way down then bump it up one notch at a time til you no longer hear any crackling.