Summary of "Emulation On The Raspberry Pi 5 Is Already Really Good! Pi5 EMU Testing"
Emulation testing on Raspberry Pi 5 (ETA Prime)
Purpose / context
- Early-stage testing of emulation on the Raspberry Pi 5
- Limited availability of “higher-end” emulators at the time of filming
Pi 5 hardware baseline
- 8GB model, no overclocking
- Quad-core Cortex-A76 @ 2.4 GHz
- VideoCore GPU up to 800 MHz
- Claimed 2–3× performance improvement over Raspberry Pi 4, expected to boost emulation
Software setup / tools
Raspberry Pi OS
- Used as the testing platform
RetroArch
- Compiled from source
- Many emulator cores required manual installation
- Results were hit-or-miss, depending on the emulator/core
Pi Apps
- Used like an app store to install emulators/games
- Examples mentioned:
- Doom 3
- Downloadable demo, or replace files with your own Doom 3 assets for the full game
- Minecraft Bedrock
- PSP emulator tools and access to emulator options (not all work on Pi 5 yet)
- Doom 3
Emulator results by platform
Game Boy Advance (GBA)
- Emulator/core: RetroArch testing
- Example: Sonic Advance 3
- Performance: Reported as full speed (FPS shown on-screen)
- Described as not difficult to emulate
Nintendo 64 (N64)
- Emulator/core: Mupen64 via RetroArch
- Overall: Described as “really awesome” and more promising than Pi 4
Performance notes
- Uses default resolution for tested titles
- Rogue Squadron: parallel controller test caused RetroArch to crash / fail to boot → “needs work”
- GoldenEye 007: performance described as around par with Rockchip RK33xx ($33.99 chip)
- Dips occur when turning corners and during action
Conclusion
- Likely to reach full-speed N64 as more developers optimize for Pi 5
Sega Saturn
- Tried a Saturn emulator/core
- Result: Could not get it to boot (Saturn explicitly mentioned as not working)
Dreamcast
- Emulator: Redream
- Result: Works right out of the box
- Downloaded from the Redream website
- Includes its own Mesa driver
- Notes that a Flycast core in RetroArch didn’t work for the tester
Examples
- Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (video plays)
Performance
- Generally surprisingly good despite the new GPU
PSP
- Emulator: Standalone PPSSPP
- Tester could only get a specific build working
- No Vulkan support in that version → uses OpenGL
Resolution / performance examples
- Ridge Racer: 2× resolution, no hacks (no frame skip), good FPS
- 3× caused dips with many cars
- Ratchet & Clank: 3× resolution, stays around 30 FPS
- Mentioned the game was natively 30 FPS on PSP
- Hacks exist for higher FPS, but weren’t used by the tester
- Dissidia (“deia”): 30 FPS at native
- 3× wasn’t stable → 2× used
- God of War: Chains of Olympus
- Biggest challenge
- Ran at 1×
- Improved vs Pi 4, but has noticeable gameplay dips
- Steady initially, then drops, then recovers
Roadmap expectation
- Vulkan support/optimizations should further improve PSP performance on Pi 5
Overall conclusions / expectations
- Pi 5 is already showing meaningful emulation upgrades over Pi 4:
- Great results for GBA, N64, Dreamcast
- PSP is playable and scales with resolution, but God of War remains tough
- Many cores/emulators are not compatible or booting reliably, likely due to the new CPU/GPU
- Improvements are expected as more developers update emulators/cores for Pi 5
Main speakers / sources
- Speaker/source: ETA Prime (main presenter/testing)
- Referenced sources:
- Raspberry Pi Foundation (claims about Pi 5 performance uplift)
- Redream website (standalone emulator download)
Category
Technology
Share this summary
Is the summary off?
If you think the summary is inaccurate, you can reprocess it with the latest model.
Preparing reprocess...