There are other issues open for libretro performance problems, though, so I'm going to close this. It might be there's something that can be fixed here, but it may also just be limitations of libretro. It also doesn't really surprise me if other emulators for weaker systems, which haven't worked so hard to optimize, benefit from the generic, but optimized, parts of libretro. Especially when using threads seems like a foreign concept to them and they've designed everything thinking about emulating little things like the NES or SNES. Since those parts are common and generic, it's not really surprising to me that they're slower and worse than equivalent parts in a specialized and very optimized emulator. It's not some magic dust that makes any emulator better, it's just an implementation of some parts of an emulator that could in theory be common. In contrast, libretro was designed for simpler systems - like the SNES (the PSP is 93x as powerful) or PS1 (the PSP is 10x as powerful) and interferes with some of the threading we do in how its API is designed. We've done a lot in PPSSPP to optimize for Android devices, and use threading and other things as much as we can to maximize performance. In many cases, it's down to terrible graphics drivers (desktop graphics drivers are far more mature.) Weaker Android devices tend to have less powerful CPUs and GPUs than even low spec laptops. This simply isn't true of Android devices.

Any potato PC built in the last 10 years that uses an Intel or AMD CPU is likely going to get a stable framerate in almost all games at reasonable settings. People have complained about PPSSPP not running well with > 2x PSP render resolution or other graphics enhancements on PCs released before the PSP was released in 2005. Your assumption there that a 'potato' PC can't still be better than a mobile phone is probably not correct.

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