The Raspberry Pi 4 Is A Gaming Beast

so last year we had the Raspberry Pi for release and I picked it up and I was really excited to check it out and see how it would play different games through emulation but there's one issue it really wasn't supported when it came out it was this big deal in the Raspberry Pi community but it's taken some time for everything to kind of catch up to it and now that it has it looks like from what I'm seeing the Raspberry Pi 4 is an absolute beast we had benchmarks before that would show how much stronger it technically was than the Raspberry Pi 3 but now we have retropie releasing a build that is specific and designed around the Raspberry Pi for something we have not had up until like last month before that there were some workarounds and different things you could do to make it work but having something like retropie actually fully compatible and built for it is exciting stuff so today I wanted to go ahead and build one of these out check it out play some games on it and see how it is because I did a video a while ago on the Raspberry Pi 3 and I really like that device so I figure a let's check out the Raspberry Pi 4 because from the specs and everything about it it looks like it's the new gaming Beast again now you'll notice I have two different boxes here this one is a case that's something else I was kind of waiting to really I guess kind of build up over time as manufacturers kind of got a hold of the Raspberry Pi 4 and built around it casings for the Raspberry Pi 3 have evolved substantially over kind of the course of its life so naturally the Raspberry Pi 4 had the same thing happened just because of how popular the Raspberry Pi brand is and we have this casing here that I saw it looks pretty good great reviews and it has its own cooling solution inside that's something that the Raspberry Pi 4 you have to be mindful of is that it does get fairly hot so we're gonna install it into here and then we'll kind of go over and play some games on this guy I've already loaded up an SD card with retropie for this ahead of time so be pretty straightforward I think now the box for the Raspberry Pi is extremely simplistic there's not a lot going on here in fact when you open it up it's literally just the board inside like this is a cheap board to buy like it's not it's inexpensive I don't say it's cheap it's inexpensive I would say but you legitimately don't get much with it there are kits you can buy on Amazon which I'll link a lot of this stuff down below in the description for you if you want to check it out but other than the board you get some instructions and basically a little guide that tells you what you should and shouldn't do with it you know temperature related static all of that to be careful when you're handling it but let's take a quick look around this board so starting off at the heart of the Raspberry Pi 4 we have our big ole SOC right here that is the Broadcom BCM to 711 it's a quad core a 72 processor clocked at 1.5 gigahertz it is a 64-bit processor on the GPU side it's a Broadcom video call video course 6 which is a step up from the video core 4 I believe that's on the PI 3 be if you've had that and you had good performance on that performance you were pretty happy with this is going to be a pretty big step up for you on that front as many benchmarks show a sizable jump in performance some people have recorded 60 to 70 percent jump overall next to it you can see we have our RAM right here and this board comes in several different variants when it comes to RAM you can have a one gigabyte two gigabyte or a 4 gigabyte that is lpddr4 a big step up from ddr2 obviously from the Raspberry Pi 3 which is awesome I'm very happy that we had such a substantial jump in RAM it's really cool to see that now on the back is where things get pretty interesting because yes we do have USB 3 ports along side of our USB 2 ports so before it was all USB 2 but now we have a much higher throughput in terms of transfer speeds with USB 3 and the ethernet is true gigabit which is very very good for people who have raspberry PI's and use it for network all kinds of applications they're very happy with that on the side they opted to eliminate the full size HDMI port and went with 2 smaller like mini or micro HDMI ports here but this is now capable of 4k 60 on a single display or 4k 30 on a dual monitor setup so that is really really cool that one downside of course you'll have to have a cable that then converts the one or both of these even to full HDMI out does also have full wireless up two wireless a/c and bluetooth 5.0 and a capital off they did make the jump to USB type-c which is significantly better of course I love that everything is going to USBC ok with all the technical details out of the way let's go ahead and actually install it into our case pop the SD card in and go play some games on it now this case is full aluminium so that was one of the big things there it looks pretty nice very sleek looking it's the argon one pi/4 and it looked like a pretty good case overall for everything that you need whereas otherwise you get like a case and it might be kind of plasticky and then you gotta also throw a heatsink on and then you got to kind of match up the fan there's a lot going on sometimes with these cases but this looked pretty good also at very very good reviews so I guess we'll check this out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so the reason you saw that that montage bit being put together the audio unfortunately stopped recording because well turns out I forgot to change the batteries out in the recorder for that microphone but still gonna talk about it here and I'll talk a bit about the case as well now the case itself as you saw it was pretty easy but it really was not that difficult there is actually an extension that kind of puts it at like a right like at a right angle so that all the ports go out of the back which is great I really like that feature about the case the cooling is good has a fan and for the most part the entire case is kind of used as a heat sink which means this case along with the Raspberry Pi 4 gives us some pretty good results when it comes to overclocking and I did that pretty much immediately with this Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi for up to 2 gigahertz on the CPU and I pushed it to 600 megahertz on the GPU now this entire video wasn't really set up to be a tutorial of any kind I kind of just wanted to build a Raspberry Pi 4 and put retropie on it now that it's been available but if you want to find I think a pretty good channel for going from like start to finish with Raspberry Pi and to kind of keep up on the news around emulation with it I would check out ETA prime that's probably your best bet for a source to kind of get started with it but I do like the case I kind of wish that there was a front USB in some way whether they route one from the back to the front or I don't know something because otherwise you end up having to plug your cable in for like your controller I'm using just they just I just wired up an Xbox one controller but I have to plug it into the back of it which might be a little strange if you have it like an entertainment center you have to like get behind it maybe take the take the box and kind of slide it around and plug it in it's the whole thing I think we really cool if it was just on the front but let's talk a little bit about the games and there is one system I am very impressed with and it's actually one of the reasons I wanted to build this out and that is for the Dreamcast so we're gonna save that for the end but if you bought this system and you're thinking of like Super Nintendo Nintendo Genesis I'll tell you now they're gonna work fine like we're to the point where the those systems are pretty much taken care of developed emulated like no no sweat there the Raspberry Pi 3 be pretty much took care of those systems as well so naturally the Raspberry Pi 4 does as well for example the Game Boy Advance that is one that is pretty much taken care of completely I played some Megaman and bass on it and a few other games didn't have any issues it was it was good pretty much all the way around but when we go up from there to say the Nintendo 64 that it still needs some work sorry that's that's what we'll say with the 64 unfortunately the Raspberry Pi version of the n64 for the emulators it's still not that great even with the PI for being overclocked still struggles at times gold and I had some pretty bad stuttering but I will say it runs about what I would expect from a Nintendo 64 except it looks a bit cleaner like I mean let's be real you play Goldeneye you expect some low frame rates on the Nintendo 64 so I guess it at least looks cleaner same with Perfect Dark banjo kazooie kind of ran in slow-motion a bit so that one unfortunately was kind of off but as for a lot of the shooters some of the platformers those run about what a Nintendo 64 would run maybe slightly better with a cleaner image so I guess there's that now on the other side the original playstation is pretty impressive I went ahead and turned on crash bandicoot 2 check it out and it works well I mean it's very responsive with the input there are some like graphical glitches that I noticed but it was pretty smooth no issues there I'm series I just played right through it I said okay yeah that's Crash Bandicoot alright and if you're planning the other RPGs Final Fantasies and others for example on this system and there are a lot of JRPGs on the playstation to explore and even some strange ones even like some of the digimon games they run fine like you're not gonna have any issues there the PlayStation emulators are a bit better it seems when it comes to compatibility and just playability versus like the Nintendo 64 oh and I also tried out the PSP thats the ppsspp emulator on the Raspberry Pi 4 and it works great it locks for example I was playing Crisis Core locks it at 30 frames and there are a bunch of other options you can do to play around with the image possibly framerate but I left that how it was locked at 30 played a bunch of crisis court it was awesome by the way to have crisis court up on the TV it was really really cool that way I didn't have to do that weird thing we plug in a PSP to kind of make it work didn't have to worry about that played it no problem it looked looked pretty good I mean it's a PSP game so it's of course this little image blown up to like a bigger screen but I think for the most part it worked out pretty well the PSP emulator is good but now the main event and that is the Dreamcast and I gotta say it's good okay like it's very good and the emulator that everyone seems to use is redream and that is part of the experimental section of kind of the cores that they have loaded on the retropie so you have to go in and install it yourself but once you do and you start playing games on it you will kind of wonder why is this in the experimental section because I didn't really have any issues I think Sonic Adventure crashed once on me but otherwise it was fine now this was running on an overclocked Raspberry Pi 4 I played it a little bit on its regular clock settings and it was fine it dipped a little bit into like the lower 50s at times but once I overclocked it it was locked at 60 I was playing Crazy Taxi with no issues I moved over to jet grind radio no issues Tony Hawk pro skater 2 played and felt great which I actually liked the version on the Dreamcast by the way the ps1 version was the one that pretty much everyone played but I think the Dreamcast version was actually really smooth and looked good with the Dreamcast visuals but everything I played even Sonic Adventure the funny thing with Sonic Adventure I I have such a hard time telling if it's just a game that looks glitchy at times or if it's the emulator itself because it's Sonic Adventure but like yeah they all played fine and it is it's impressive by the way to see the Dreamcast to this point and the Raspberry Pi to this point kind of just intersecting colliding right now with the emulation scene and kind of the small low powered board scene it's impressive stuff the the people who are developing these emulators are very talented clearly and it's just it's very impressive to see the Dreamcast running to this extent on a board that's pulling roughly seven and a half watts right now when it's under load it's it's impressive stuff from what I can tell the different variants of the raspberry pie for if you're just doing emulators you can probably get away with the two gigabyte version I mean the four gigabyte version is just nice to have but if you're not planning on doing anything like desktop oriented like you know running loading full Linux and like using it as a little mini PC you're probably going to be okay with the two gigabyte variant I would say but I would immediately overclock it with a good case that's just my advice because it does kind of give it that extra boost of performance and I gotta say retropie on the Raspberry Pi 4 looks pretty good right now great great gaming device to have small enough to fit in any kind of entertainment center quiet enough to very quiet and now that it has kind of the 4k output and it does pretty well with something like Kodi it makes sense to even have as like a little media center PC HD PC kinda to drop in there if you want to just use it to do streaming of movies and stuff as well a pretty cool device that we have here with the Raspberry Pi 4 and I do recommend its price of I think the roof is like $65 if I'm not mistaken and they were even selling them at certain Best Buy's as well that are open now or reopening or whatnot otherwise you want Amazon grab one or even grab a kit and you're pretty much ready to go anyway guys that is the Raspberry Pi 4 with retropie now installed made available currently to load up yourself on an SD card let me know what you think about this down below make sure you guys like the video on the way out I've enjoyed it just like it if not I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Spawn Wave

Views: 1,151,025

Keywords: raspberry pi 4, emulation, dreamcast, redream, ps1, n64, snes, gameboy, gameboy advance, video games, raspberry pi 4 overclock, raspberry pi 4 dreamcast, how does it play, worth buying, build raspberry pi 4, best raspberry pi 4 case, spawn wave, spawn wave media, tech wave, raspberry pi 4 tech wave

Id: DvdiVwx996s

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/gowahoo]

I'm so excited for this. This is what I wanted from the Raspberry Pis since the beginning.

[u/jayjr1105]

Beast is a bit of s stretch. Too many adapters and accessories needed for a Pi4 to be properly done. Still not as fast as a 3 year old Odroid Xu4

[u/Smakx]

"Beast" might be a subjective term, thousands of games on a $45 computer is still something I find amazing, viva la emulation :)

[u/Vesparco]

It can be quite interesting if a computer module 4 releases this year with similar specs. I wonder why not many ( if any) retrogaming devices uses the gpi case approach.