Home Page Forums MAME Non-Windows MAME Support Trying out Ubuntu 21.10, bgfx slow

Hi guys,

Thought I'd give ubuntu 21.10 a go and see how it worked.

Seems to work fine with wayland.

The system only has 4GB of memory but it's a core-i5 with 2 cores * 2 threads so you can do a make -j4 but since it only has 4GB it basically freezes while thrashing the swapfile when it runs out of memory doing all the simultaneous compiles so I only do a make -j2.


The compiling mame docs say that you install these packages :



However, qt5-default doesn't work:

According to this page, https://askubuntu.com/questions/1335184/qt5-default-not-in-ubuntu-21-04 just replace qt5-default with

or all in one:


I don't seem to need to do 'make CFLAGS="-U_FORTIFY_SOURCE" '.

It compiled with it and without it.

Also 21.10 will allow you to "sudo apt install clang" without any problems (wouldn't work with 20.04) if you feel like doing "make OVERRIDE_CC=clang OVERRIDE_CXX=clang++".
(from https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/Building_MAME)



The only thing that I noticed that was problematic was that bgfx video would get very slow with -numscreens 2. It was fine with -numscreens 1. Regular opengl was fine.

More than one screen with bgfx would have black screens on startup (that should say the gameinfo, this game doesn't work etc) but hitting the space bar would continue (since mame was waiting for input) where the video was working but it would run video around 70% of normal speed. Also bgfx seems to segfault on exit with more than one screen (blows up in bgfx::reset(unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned int, bgfx::TextureFormat::Enum)()


On this system I have both intel integrated video and a low profile AMD Cedar radeon video card (using ubuntu's regular drivers) with one monitor on the integrated and another on the AMD cedar. Setting the display to just use a single screen with the intel integrated video didn't seem to make any difference with regards to bgfx and multiple screens (-numscreens 2).

Unthrottled, the bgfx seems to run at 120-130% with a single screen (-numscreens 1) and the apple2e driver with the ap2000.
With -numscreens 2 that goes to 60-70% (which I guess is roughly half of what the single screen is doing).

Opengl -numscreens 1 unthrottled is 270-300%
Opengl -numscreens 2 unthrottled is 160-170%

What the cpu power profile used ? power saver ?
Try using performance o schedutil.
You can change cpu power profiles using cpufreqindicator.

Hi Augusto,

Thanks for the suggesstion.

I installed "indicator-cpufreq" with sudo apt install indicator-cpufreq and can run it with "indicator-cpufreq" and set the cpu into "performance" or "powersave".

It doesn't seem to affect my performance too much but I did learn about how to switch cpu frequency modes easily.

Thanks Augusto!