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

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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)

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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

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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

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Sega Saturn

• Tried a Saturn emulator/core
• Result: Could not get it to boot (Saturn explicitly mentioned as not working)

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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

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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

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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

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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)