Raspberry Pi 3B+ Running Slow

[TheToxicgamer97]

Hi Everyone,

Looking for help with my pi. It can't play a Youtube video or Twitch stream without buffering. No other apps are running and I've tried it on Chromium and Firefox. My intended use case is for game emulation, and Moonlight to stream my PC to my living room.

I'm using an official power adapter. I formatted and installed RaspberryPi OS to my microSD card using the official installer. The microSD card is a 64GB SanDisk UltraPlus with U1 speed rating. This is the only variable I can think of that would be an issue, but through all of my googling it seems that this card should be adequate.

Any advice is much appreciated!

[OddOod]

It's a Pi, it's not meant to run fast. 
https://youtubedownload.minitool.com/youtube/netflix-youtube-on-raspberry-pi.html#:~:text=on Raspberry Pi%3F-,Raspberry Pi Cannot Handle Streaming Video Very Well,-Raspberry Pi is

[TheToxicgamer97]

13 minutes ago, OddOod said:

It's a Pi, it's not meant to run fast. 
https://youtubedownload.minitool.com/youtube/netflix-youtube-on-raspberry-pi.html#:~:text=on Raspberry Pi%3F-,Raspberry Pi Cannot Handle Streaming Video Very Well,-Raspberry Pi is

Even if it can't handle streaming for whatever reason, it should still be able to run an emulator. Plenty of people do it, I'm trying to figure out why I can't.

[OddOod]

Moonlight, Youtube, and Twitch are all streaming which it will suck at. emulation will be fine because it's not streaming, but I'd go with RetroPie

[TheToxicgamer97]

12 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Moonlight, Youtube, and Twitch are all streaming which it will suck at. emulation will be fine because it's not streaming, but I'd go with RetroPie

Emulation is not fine though. I installed retropie over rpiOS and tried playing castlevania for the NES and it was like I was playing in slow motion.

[demonix00]

2 hours ago, TheToxicgamer97 said:

Emulation is not fine though. I installed retropie over rpiOS and tried playing castlevania for the NES and it was like I was playing in slow motion.

Did you log out of the desktop environment before launching retropie?

 

Have you made sure that you have increased the amount of RAM allocated to the GPU before installing retropie as that is required when doing a manual install (this is the reason why using the standalone setup is better since it is already configured out of the box).

[OddOod]

1 hour ago, demonix00 said:

Did you log out of the desktop environment before launching retropie?

 

aaaaand we have gone about a mile over my head. I leave you in the capable hands of demonix

[steelo]

5 hours ago, TheToxicgamer97 said:

Emulation is not fine though. I installed retropie over rpiOS and tried playing castlevania for the NES and it was like I was playing in slow motion.

The rpi 3 is very limited with RAM and cpu. I would highly recommend installing retropie on its own dedicated sd card without installing raspberry pi os. I run retropie on a rpi zero (1/2 the ram and 1/4 the cpu cores) with no problems, so you shouldn't have these issues.

 

And rpi 0, 1, 2 and 3's suck for youtube playback or any form of web browsing.

[TheToxicgamer97]

1 minute ago, steelo said:

The rpi 3 is very limited with RAM and cpu. I would highly recommend installing retropie on its own dedicated sd card with no other os. I run reteopie on a rpi zero, so you shouldn't have these issues.

3 hours ago, demonix00 said:

Did you log out of the desktop environment before launching retropie?

 

Have you made sure that you have increased the amount of RAM allocated to the GPU before installing retropie as that is required when doing a manual install (this is the reason why using the standalone setup is better since it is already configured out of the box).

I don't remember if I logged out of the desktop environment or not, it was several months ago. I don't think I changed the GPU RAM. If I go with standalone retropie, can I install other apps such as Moonlight? Moonlight was working ok, better than an internet stream. But both my desktop and pi are on wifi which is likely the issue there.

[steelo]

8 minutes ago, TheToxicgamer97 said:

I don't remember if I logged out of the desktop environment or not, it was several months ago. I don't think I changed the GPU RAM. If I go with standalone retropie, can I install other apps such as Moonlight? Moonlight was working ok, better than an internet stream. But both my desktop and pi are on wifi which is likely the issue there.

I've never tried moonlight (it's for nvidia gpu's, right?) but I assume you need some version of raspberry pi os. If that's the case, I'd install the light version of the rpi os. It is terminal based (text only), but much kinder on your ram and cpu as far as overhead for running retropie or moonlight.

[TheToxicgamer97]

4 minutes ago, steelo said:

I've never tried moonlight (it's for nvidia gpu's, right?) but I assume you need some version of raspberry pi os. If that's the case, I'd install the light version of the rpi os. It is terminal based (text only), but much kinder on your ram and cpu as far as overhead for running retropie or moonlight.

I had tried the light version, but ran into some other roadblock I don't remember. Maybe I'll give it another try.

How much do you know the microSD requirements? Do you think what I have is adequate to run the OS and apps? "64GB SanDisk UltraPlus with U1 speed rating"

[steelo]

9 minutes ago, TheToxicgamer97 said:

I had tried the light version, but ran into some other roadblock I don't remember. Maybe I'll give it another try.

How much do you know the microSD requirements? Do you think what I have is adequate to run the OS and apps? "64GB SanDisk UltraPlus with U1 speed rating"

Oh yeah, that card should be fine. sd card read/write speeds frankly suck (even if it's the fastest sd card you can buy), so when the pi runs out of ram and uses swap memory, everything is going to slow down to a crawl. That's why you want as little overhead as possible while running retropie or moonlight.