Hardware News: The Raspberry Pi 4 just got released with a better CPU/GPU/RAM but is it a good choice for gaming and emulation?
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, then you’ve heard of the Raspberry Pi which is a low-priced single board computer. Today, the Raspberry Pi 4 got released and it’s a great improvement over its predecessor but should you buy one?
What hardware does the Raspberry Pi 4 pack in?
The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (the only RPi4 model at the moment) is the direct successor to the Model 3B/3B+ and comes with some pretty nice improvements while keeping the same $35 price tag. These improvements, which include a better CPU/GPU and more RAM, will be discussed in this list in relation to the Raspberry Pi 3B+:
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The CPU is still a Quad-Core ARM64 chip from Broadcom but the clock speed has been increased to 1.5GHz from 1.4GHz
- Other than that, the cores are now of the Cortex-A72 rather than the Cortex-A53 variant which translates in significant performance boosts thanks to a wider instruction pipeline and support for out-of-order execution
- From Linpack and SysBench CPU tests performed by Tom’s Hardware, the RPi 4 is 4x and 1.5 faster respectively
- In regards to RAM, 2GB and 4GB variants have been added while the 1GB model has been retained
- The 1GB model costs $35, the 2GB one $45 and the 4GB comes in at $55
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The GPU has been upgraded to a VideoCore VI @ 500MHz from a VideoCore IV @ 400MHz and this brings along 4K monitor support and OpenGL ES 3.x which could be very useful for emulation (more below)
- Unfortunately, the GPU or the drivers don’t seem to be too great since the OpenArena Benchmark (an FPS game based on the Quake III Arena engine from 1999) returned a measly 41.4FPS @ 720p. This is an improvement over the 27.8FPS that the RPi 3B+ was able to do but it’s still not great considering how the age of Quake III engine
- Furthermore, video playback on YouTube seems to be pretty horrid as it manages to stutter even at 480p when in full-screen mode although 1080p offline clips seem to play fine
- When it comes to I/O, the RPi 4 provides a refreshing improvement over its predecessor since it has dual micro-HDMI ports, 2 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0 ports, a USB-C port for charging, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0 and a microSD reader that has a maximum throughput of 50MB/s
- Finally, the thermals of the RPi 4 don’t seem to be great as it could heat up to the mid-70s (degrees Celsius) while the RPi 3B+ only got the lower-60s (degrees Celsius) under heavy load and throttling is to be expected after a few minutes unless you install a heatsink
Is it a good choice for emulation and gaming?
As of right now, the very popular emulation software RetroPie isn’t working on the Raspberry Pi 4 which didn’t allow folks to test out emulation performance although some conclusions can be probably be reached with the benchmarks we have.
Many emulators are more CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive so existing emulators, for consoles like SNES, PSP and PS1, will undoubtely work better and allow for more accurate emulation & enhancements which are usually more demanding. Furthermore, OpenGL ES 3.x will allow some emulators to run on the Raspberry Pi for the first time and these include Yaba Sanshiro (Sega Saturn), better GlideN64 performance with the GLES3 backend and even Dolphin (Wii/GameCube).
However, it’s important to note that the GPU doesn’t seem to be a powerhouse from the few tests that are available which could potentially mean that it’ll be the system’s bottleneck when it comes to gaming. In light of this, it’s probably a better idea to either wait and see how the RPi 4 really performs in emulation when RetroPie gets updated but more realistically, it’s important to note that Raspberry Pi is probably not the ideal console for emulation and gaming.
If you want a cheap device to hook up to a spare television/monitor for some gaming/emulation, you’re probably better off looking at local market places for a cheap used PC/laptop that’s a decade old or perhaps make use of an older system that you no longer use since some upgrades could greatly improve performance!
Conclusion
On a concluding note, I would personally say that it’s unlikely that the RPi 4 will become a go-to device for post-4th generation home console emulation & gaming but it’ll certainly do these tasks better than its predecessors.
That being said, if you’re considering buying this device for these purposes, you should certainly wait a bit till RetroPie and other software gets updated to check out how they work before putting down money on this since $55 can go a long a way in the used computer market!
Tom’s Hardware RPi 4 Review (figures from it were used in this article): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.html
Raspberry Pi Website: https://www.raspberrypi.org/
“the cores are now of the Cortex-A53 rather than the Cortex-A72 variant”
i think you got those two mixed up, its the other way around.
I noticed that too.
You’re right. Fixed now 🙂
Just for gaming, a modded Wii still out does the Pi in most cases. The Pi’s HDMI ports are nice in an era where TVs are quickly ditching analog inputs, but everything else just tilts in the Wii’s favor.
That said, the Pi 3B can play video over composite (for CRTs) nicely compared to the Wii.
Both of the processors are of the same micro-architecture and both of them are super scalar in nature which allows for a high range of throughput due to the level of parallelism.
However the Cortex-A72 should perform better as it makes use of a 3 way super scalar instead of the 2 way of A53 and it also makes use of out of order execution for more efficient use of the instruction cycles as the instructions are queued when the necessary data are unavailable which prevents the stalls which are generally present at in-order processors due to unavailable data. There have also been mentions of the improved power efficiency in the A72 due to improvements in the decode/dispatch stages of the processor.
These benefits coupled with bunch of it’s other features will give the A72 a great deal of advantage over A53 in single thread performance and thus I conclude that A72 will fare better than A53 when placed in the same clock speed.
So you got it other way around!