So my current experience with Plex Arcade is that it shows potential but ultimately its really lacks anything worth any investment.
No customisation of settings for sound, resolutions, controls etc. No ability to select cores from within plex settings or any kind of back end visibility of Arcade from within plex.
N64 and 32x seem to really struggle with rendering audio and video. I use a Dell PowerEdge R720 with an Nvidia GTX1050ti 4GB Windrush OC card. The card is supported by Parsec, supports hardware transcoding in plex and the server has more than enough bandwidth and power to run the emulators but Plex Arcade just cant play the N64 or 32x games without stuttering audio and slow video rendering. When i look at the streaming status on plex its only showing about 300Kbps in use maximum for the game thats being streamed. The issue as far as i can tell is the offloading of the game emulation to Parsec as from what i gather all the emulation work is done on the parsec servers and plex simply passes the rendering info through to the client?? I cannot see where there is a performance bottleneck but there should be no issue with modern hardware emulating these systems and rendering successfully so the issue must lie in the way the back end is put together.
can you give a few specific examples of things you’d like to customize? would be super helpful.
just to explain, the retro cores/emulation run locally on your computer and Parsec just handles the video/audio streaming to the client. so definitely keep an eye on CPU usage, e.g.
Control audio emulation, channels, bitrate etc.
Specify resolution that the emulator is displayed at. Scaling, FPS.
configure analogue, digital joysticks, button mappings, trigger/shoulder button mappings
If the emulation is all run locally and using parsec to stream it then presuming the video and audio streams are separate then it would seem that the audio transcoding is causing issues. Could that be related to the lack of a physical soundcard in the server?
In terms of testing I’m presuming that the best thing to do would be to install an emulator directly on the server and see if that runs fine using the hardware
out of curiosity (asking mostly because i’ve never had to tweak these settings), what specifically would you change? or do you mean just tweaking settings to see which works best?
resolution/scaling make a lot of sense to me, we’re working out how to expose that.
have you run into any bad mappings? we’d love to know specifics as we’re trying to get things to work as well as possible out of the box.
N64 has loads of issues as they N64 uses an analogue stick and trigger button in the grip for many games. On screen only give you D-pad emulation. Also would be nice to modify screen layout to include ZL, ZR etc on screen rather than just L/R. The emulator should have button mapping options so you can choose your layout on a bluetooth controller and map buttons on the controller to commands to make the games playable with easily laid out controls
