Does retroarch offer performance improvements?

[monkeybomb]

I can see that retroarch offers convinece to someone just getting into this, but does it emulate more accurately than the popular emulators that we've had for 5 - 10+ years?

[vwalbridge]

As I understand it, RetroArch is not actually an emulator itself. Rather, a muli-platform front-end for the libretro API. In other words, it aggregates many other emulators as "cores".

It supports a couple of dozen cores that are already available today. So in a sense, no...it does not really offer anything better that what is already available today.

However, it is tremendously flexible because you can pick and choose your cores. It also allows you to place the game screen anywhere on the screen. Also stretch the screen to any ratio you like. Great for horizontal games on vertical screens.

I REALLY love RetroArch and have used it on one of my builds.

[Howard_Casto]

Correct, retroarch is just a front-end. 

To answer the question though, the best, most accurate version of an emulator is always the latest version.  Understand that most accurate does NOT equate to the best performance.  Quite frankly, the opposite is the case.  As mame and other emulators have evolved, they are constantly modified to be optimized to whatever the average pc is at the time.  That means that older, cruder versions of mame will run faster on less powerful machines but they will be far less accurate.  The same goes with console emulators but it isn't as pronounced because they haven't changed all that much. 

Android tablets, at least so far, aren't powerful enough to run the latest versions of mame well, so you are NEVER going to find the "best" version of an emulator on something like a tablet, or the raspberry pi, ect.  Usually they run 37b or something archaically old like that.  I would say that eventually tablets will catch up, but the pc world is charging ahead as well. 

[Yenome]

I tried retroarch and i must say im a big fan of the shaders. I did hear that they use a modified mame version to make games more playable on lesser hardware. i would be using it now but i seem to not be able to get it to save the core configs. once i get my game list completed ill be running some test on my old pentium 4 dual core to see how it stacks against mame .161