Framerate too fast with threaded video + vsync on + audio sync off

[justinweiss]

Description

I've been trying to get the threaded video driver running on 3ds, and noticed something weird that doesn't seem to be 3ds-specific.

Specifically, with audio sync off and threaded video on / vsync on, the framerate will sometimes drift up to 65-70fps, where I would expect it to be locked to vsync rate at maximum.

This seems to happen because of the scond_wait_timeout call in video_thread_wrapper.c:751(ish). If the wait times out, we will bail early and drop the frame. In this case, I see this happening when we just missed the last vsync and have to wait for the next one, which is longer than the time between the last call and this one.

If we drop a frame and the core is running fast enough, another frame can come in before the vsync we were waiting on and get handled correctly. Because we dropped the first frame, this means two frames will run under the same vsync, which will handle more than 60fps from the core's perspective.

This was some timing data I collected from a run, logging times at every vsync and at the end of each video_thread_frame call:

As you can see, video_thread_frame can get called twice per vsync (due to timeout) which gives a framerate > 60.

Increasing the timeout and removing it altogether both solve the problem, although neither seems correct to me.

Expected behavior

fps to be locked to 60fps (or lower)

Actual behavior

fps counter goes above 60fps, and the audio driver drops samples

Steps to reproduce the bug

This is in a dev build on 3ds, but I can't see why it couldn't happen in others. I don't have those others set up to check yet. It probably also depends on how different drivers listen to vsync.

In the dev build:

• Turn threaded video on
• Turn audio sync off
• Turn video sync on
• Open a pcsx_rearmed game in an area that runs > 100ish fps when not limited (towns in RPGs are good for this)
• Watch the framerate go to ~65fps and the audio drop samples

Bisect Results

N/A

Version/Commit

You can find this information under Information/System Information

• RetroArch: N/A

Environment information

• OS: Linux
• Compiler: devkitpro