Tegra Jetson Nano build?

bomblord · 05-08-2019, 03:00 AM #1

Hello all, I've been eyeing picking up a Tegra Jetson Nano Board mainly to use for emulation and as an upgrade to my current Raspberry Pi setup. Seeing as the same CPU and a slightly more powerful GPU in the shield TV can run Dolphin well even with insane overhead of Android I figured this would handle it no problem and I've seen that you can indeed run Dolphin on it but there's an issue....

According to the only source I found about it only an out of date version of Dolphin compiles and runs on the board and because of that it lacks a large number of optimizations on the ARM build which could theoretically push it well into playable territory as opposed to the mixed bag of the current setup. Anyone know if a more recent build that can work on this board exists? And if so how can I get it?

**Helios** · 05-08-2019, 03:18 AM #2

Master compiles fine. I have the jetson nano.

Runs a bit worse than the shield TV but thats not surprising given the clock speed differences. If you're looking for a solid ARM board to hack on Dolphin with, it's great.

If you just want to play games, I wouldn't bother with Dolphin. This is a slower X1.

bomblord · (This post was last modified: 05-08-2019, 03:27 AM by bomblord.)

(05-08-2019, 03:18 AM)Helios Wrote: Master compiles fine. I have the jetson nano.

Runs a bit worse than the shield TV but thats not surprising given the clock speed differences. If you're looking for a solid ARM board to hack on Dolphin with, it's great.

If you just want to play games, I wouldn't bother with Dolphin. This is a slower X1.

Good to know that the lastest version compiles fine but it's not really playable? That's disappointing, I was hoping to get an all in one SBC under my TV at home to run emulators on. As mentioned I currently have a Pi3 with retropie but have run into it's limitations pretty hard and fast once I wanted to try N64 and some more demanding PS1 games. Dolphin on an SBC has been a dream of mine and I really don't want to shell out the extra for a Shield TV and have to deal with Android.

**Helios** · 05-08-2019, 03:35 AM #4

I'm sure quite a few games are playable, but I'm mostly just warning to manage your expectations here because it is a weaker shield TV. And while the Shield TV runs a lot of games fine, a lot of games are still limited by those 4 year old A57 cores.

bomblord · (This post was last modified: 05-08-2019, 03:42 AM by bomblord.)

(05-08-2019, 03:35 AM)Helios Wrote: I'm sure quite a few games are playable, but I'm mostly just warning to manage your expectations here because it is a weaker shield TV. And while the Shield TV runs a lot of games fine, a lot of games are still limited by those 4 year old A57 cores.

Ahh I see thanks for the heads up. Do you know of any SBC's that run dolphin well more consistently?

**mstreurman** · (This post was last modified: 05-09-2019, 08:59 AM by mstreurman.)

(05-08-2019, 03:40 AM)bomblord Wrote: Ahh I see thanks for the heads up. Do you know of any SBC's that run dolphin well more consistently?

You could try a Lattepanda Alpha, most video's that show Dolphin running on it seem to run a full speed using the native resolution (1xIR) But I can't say for certain that it will run everything perfectly as it is still quite a slow machine. The fun thing about this one is that it has 2 M.2 slots a 4xPCIe and a 2xPCIe, thus with a M.2 to 16xPCIe you could run a real GPU and get some nice upscaling as well, and as it is an x86 CPU you can run Windows (10) on it.

Downside to it is that it is quite expensive as a whole.

bomblord · 05-09-2019, 09:58 PM #7

(05-09-2019, 08:58 AM)mstreurman Wrote: You could try a Lattepanda Alpha, most video's that show Dolphin running on it seem to run a full speed using the native resolution (1xIR) But I can't say for certain that it will run everything perfectly as it is still quite a slow machine. The fun thing about this one is that it has 2 M.2 slots a 4xPCIe and a 2xPCIe, thus with a M.2 to 16xPCIe you could run a real GPU and get some nice upscaling as well, and as it is an x86 CPU you can run Windows (10) on it.

Downside to it is that it is quite expensive as a whole.

I have seen that one they just updated it to a core M3 8100 which apparently has 30% more performance. It's definitely more expensive but it might be worth the 3x price increase for the increased CPU performance.

**KHg8m3r** · 05-15-2019, 02:44 AM #8

Why not get a mini PC like the Skull Canyon Intel NUC?

**Helios** · (This post was last modified: 05-15-2019, 03:45 AM by Helios.)

$500 vs $100?

And the GPU is still kinda shitty.

At $500 might as well build a tiny PC.

**JonnyH** · (This post was last modified: 05-15-2019, 05:12 AM by JonnyH.)

(05-08-2019, 03:00 AM)bomblord Wrote: ...even with insane overhead of Android...

The performance critical parts of dolphin are native code, even on android, so realistically have no overhead. Much of the "slowness" are driver issues (which for the most part the nvidia drivers are great, so don't affect this), the arm64 JIT sometimes being less efficient than the equivalent x86_64 (which is the case even with no android), and power/thermal limits (which a SBC will likely not hit as much as a small phone form factor).

So don't expect things to be magically faster on the same hardware just because you don't run android.