Accelerate Emulation Speed

[kautenja]

Accelerate Emulation Speed

[Kautenja]

currently, the emulator runs as fast as FCEUX allows (3200%). I've experimented with the source code of FCEUX to see if increasing this maximal speedup to 6400, 12800, etc. allows the interface to run faster, but with no luck yet. I've also adjusted some frame limiting logic in the FCEUX source to see if that's where the bottle neck is with no result. However, this is a pressing issue and suggestions / PRs with proposed fixes are certainly welcome.

[Kautenja]

the local_FCEUX branch contains the experimental FCEUX source

[Kautenja]

a quick experiment reveals that disabling the FCEUX window altogether produces a speedup of 1.73 when running the uniform random agent (i.e. time to complete 500 steps went from 26s of latency to 15s) on my laptop (Dual Core Core i7, no discrete graphics). I'll test this on my desktop rig when I get a chance to see how the numbers compare.

This is a simple temporary fix to get some extra speed during training, assuming you don't need to monitor the agent in realtime. Just inject the following block in the training script before a call to make and the FCEUX window will not appear during execution.

import os
os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER'] = 'dummy'

[Kautenja]

Unfortunately, on my desktop machine, the speedup from this method is 0 (11s to 11s). A better solution is certainly necessary.

[Kautenja]

I've started working on the FCEUX source code to remove any frame limiting mechanisms in play here. It's a large and complex codebase, so it might be a while before this functionality is introduced.

[Kautenja]

Version 3.0 is in active development using a new emulator back-end, nes-py. It should be released in ~30 days or so. This emulator can push out 450FPS in headless mode providing a nontrivial speedup. With an overclocked NES CPU, and a frame-skip mechanism this value will likely increase close to 1000FPS comparable to the OpenAI implementation of atari-py. Will report back after nes-py 1.0 and gym-super-mario-bros 3.0 release

[Kautenja]

version 3.0 is live with a great speedup. Closing issue as any additional speedup seems unlikely given the new design is mostly C++ and as close to the hardware as possible.