Super-Smooth Gaming on PiTFT Displays

Do you have a PiGRRL or other Raspberry Pi-based portable creation? Do you enjoy fast games like Sonic the Hedgehog, but the performance of the SPI TFT display left you wanting?

Jukka Jylänki’s fbcp-ili9341 is a high-performance alternative to kernel modules, fbcp or our own userspace PiTFT software. They’ve tackled the speed issue from every angle, optimizing screen updates and doing SPI DMA things in userspace code that I had no idea were even possible…60 frames/second updates can be achieved and latency is better even than some HDMI screens.

There are fine-tuning options for every Pi and quite a few different screen types. While a Pi Zero might not keep up with the fastest games, this is the best shot there is. Eking out the very best performance takes some work…thankfully the detailed documentation is every bit as impressive as the code!

We’ve added a page to our PiTFT Games & Emulators tutorial that explains the basics. The project README on Github then goes into extensive detail.

(Photo credit Jukka Jylänki, from project repository)