Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Overview and Emulation Performance Boost - Retropie on the Pi Zero 2

the raspberry pi zero two w is finally here so let's see what it can do [Music] [Music] hi and welcome to bytes and bits the raspberry pi foundation has finally released an upgrade to their ultra small form factor raspberry pi zero so the raspberry pi zero two has exactly the same form factor as the original zero and but done so you should be able to use it as a direct swap in any of your projects now the main difference between the two is that the original single core processor has been replaced by a quad-core 64-bit arm cortex a53 device again running at one gigahertz now we still have the original 512 megabytes of ddr ram but even so this still pushes the new raspberry pi zero fairly close to the performance of the raspberry pi 3b plus so on the screen i'll run a few benchmark scores for the new model comparing it to the other raspberry pi versions now these are borrowed from eta primes review of the pi zero two which goes into a lot more detail about the hardware specifications so please do check out his video and again i'll put a link in the description below now if you look at the specifications you'll see that this new pi 02 and the 3b plus that they both use the same quad core arm cortex a53 processor um although the 3b plus of course is running at 1.4 gigahertz rather than 1 gigahertz and it has double the ram at one gigabytes of ddr2 now compared to the original pi zero this new version offers a 40 increase in single core performance but a whopping 500 increase in multi-core performance and of course this is basically due to it actually having multiple cores rather than just the one now i've already seen some examples of people overclocking the this new pi zero up to 1.3 gigahertz and that pretty much matches the benchmark scores of the larger 3b plus model um so all of this sounds very promising for getting a big boost in performance from this very small board now with this performance increase i guess there will be lots of talk about how this new board will be even better at running a linux desktop and allowing you to use it as an incredibly small work computer um but for me i'm more interested in the performance boosts i'll get when using it as the main processing board for a handhold retro gaming system now i have been building up a handheld device based on the original raspberry pi zero but that was starting to struggle with some of the 16 and 32-bit consoles especially as we were running some lcd screen optimization software and which allowed it to get a high frame rate on a very cheap spi lcd panel so i did make a number of videos going over that project and i will put links to those down in the description below so you can see how that all was set up so in in this video i just want to get a first look at the performance improvement that this new board will give us over the original raspberry pi zero so i'm going to compare both boards running retropie using a standard hdmi display and a standard usb game controller rather than hooking it up to the hardware that i was using on the get handhold device now one of the first issues you'll need to overcome and this is only because the board is currently very very new it's only been released a couple of days ago and that is that the official retropie release version for the pi zero it is not compatible with the new pi zero two however since the new board does share the same processor cores as the pi 3b plus um the builds for that system should give it actual better compatibility now again the new pi zero 2 board does use a different wi-fi chip to the 3b plus so we do need to use one of the very latest builds of retropie rather than the official release stable version as these include the newer kernel that has the correct driver software now you'll find these weekly builds in the retro pi weekly build section and again i'll put links to that down in the description below so when you when you go to that page you'll find that there is a list of sd card images that you can download and you want to make sure that you download the raspberry pi 2 stroke 3 image and then burn that onto an sd card if you then boot up the raspberry pi zero 2 you should have find that retropie installs correctly and and runs now of course if you're watching this video after the middle of november 2021 um there should be an official retropie release version which is tailored for the new raspberry pi zero two so with all that set up um let's get straight in and have a look at how these two systems compare so the original raspberry pi zero and the new raspberry pi zero two so if we have a look at some arcade action first so this is metal slug running on the main emulator with the raspberry pi zero there's the original version you can see that we are heading around about 50 frames per second and which makes the game playable but if you listen to the sound you'll find that it's not quite right okay so if we then switch across to the new pi zero two and we'll see that we're getting pretty much a good steady 60 frames per second and with this extra processing power then you can see that or you can hear that the sound is much better [Music] this extra boost in performance has really tidied up the arcade emulation so that the new pi zero two will let you play even the higher end arcade games so that was an area where the original pi zero was close to coping if we now look at the sega mega drive or genesis if you're in the us emulation we can see that the old version really wasn't able to cope both sound and video are struggling to keep up with our frame rate dropping down to the low 20s when we've got lots of action on the screen moving over to the pi zero two we instantly get full speed emulation with very close to sixty frames per second and no sound issues and this is playing vector man which is a game that really does push the mega drive close to its limits [Music] if we also have a look at gunstar heroes we'll see that with the original pi zero the game is almost unplayable but using the new version we're back up to full emulation speed with no problems [Music] so one last test just to show the performance improvements is to have a look at nintendo 64 emulation so super mario 64 it really does not like running on the older original hardware we're getting more of a slideshow rather than animation [Laughter] if we then move on to the pi zero two we're getting almost playable performance using the stop clock speed so with a bit of tweaking you might be able to get a few nintendo 64 games into a playable state [Applause] so the new raspberry pi zero 2w really does give a significant performance increase over the original pi zero simply looking at retro emulation it's opened up a number of new platforms that we can emulate using this ultra small form factor device areas where the original hardware was almost able to cope will now be fine and for me this means that even when we're running retropie emulation we'll still have some processing power for other functions such as screen optimization and input processing now the new model is slightly more expensive than the old one at around 13 pounds for the bare board compared with around 10 pounds but with such a useful increase in performance i do think it's well worth it so i hope you found this video useful please do click the like button and subscribe to my channel so you don't miss any new videos i look forward to seeing you again soon and bye for now for more games programming electronics projects and retro gaming please make sure you like this video subscribe to my youtube channel and visit my website

Channel: Bytes N Bits

Views: 7,196

Keywords: retropie, raspberry pi zero 2, retro gaming, emulation

Id: Ba_mOrADIG8

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021