Myst 3 stutters

[xaeroverse]

On Myst III: Exile, I'm experiencing long render times once I link into the first world leading to massive FPS drops and audio choppiness. In the drop location, the game stutters more when looking out into the ocean than looking at the wall. I've tried messing with many settings like Audio Sample Rate, VSync, Threaded Render, Vulkan, etc, to no avail, but I could have missed one. In contrast, the game is fine for me when played under Play Store's ScummVM's current latest standalone (version 2.9.0). Video with debug overlay:

screenrecorder-20250115-scummvm_myst3_compressed.mp4

This test.zip has the save of the above location, but one can easily get there in a couple mins from the start of the game.

Details

ScummVM Version: 7310d4e-2.10.0git (Jan 15 2025 09:54:09)
Game version: DVD
Platform: Android RetroArch v1.20.0 864ad02177

[spleen1981]

can you share also a retroarch.log with debug level set both for frontend and core?

[xaeroverse]

Sure, I also enabled the Performance counter and kept the game running for > 4096 frames, but not sure that helps.

retroarch_20250115.log

Hope I set these log settings right; I also reverted all the overrides I remembered so it's close to default.

[spleen1981]

Did you try to disable HW acceleration from core settings?
There is no support currently in the core for OpenGL for 3D games (see #55), differently from stand-alone ScummVM, and that could be the reason the performance is different between the two.
You could test both in software rendering mode, but to have a correct comparison you should test against a proper standalone daily version, as the core follows the master, not a specific release branch.

To reduce the stuttering the only option you can try core-side is Core options > Timing > Framerate cap and set it to a lower value.

[xaeroverse]

Had some time this evening to try out the daily master 27573e74 and curiously Software rendering is OK there.

screenrecorder-20250119-scummvm_myst3_compressed.mp4

I didn't try disable HW accel in core before but now that I have, I couldn't really tell a difference. The Framerate cap option set to 25 Hz does help; even though there are still frame times over 100 ms and audio underruns, it's more playable.

I'll try some combinations of all the settings I learned later and see if there's a winning combo.

[spleen1981]

Guess we can close this, 3D games performance issue is already covered by #55