PC horsepower and DirectDraw vs. Direct3D

[Cynicaster]

I'm thinking about picking up a new PC for my cabinet because the one I have is about three breaths from death (optimistically speaking).  The good news is I've already found several possible deals in local classifieds that would get me back up and running with more or less the same PC horsepower that I've got right now for under $100.  Still, I'm wondering if I should take this opportunity to upgrade to something a bit more powerful--definitely still second hand, but something better. 

I've got plenty of budget for whatever I decide, but I'm cheap, and I don't want to spend a cent more than I need to for overkill power that brings nothing new to the table.  Really, my crusty old PC runs everything I've loaded perfectly fine, at least up until the late 90's, which happens to take care of just about every game I care about. 

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm reasonably new to MAME), but what I'm starting to gather is that you can run the vast majority of games with a typical 7-8 year-old P4 (or equivalent AMD, which is what I have currently) and it takes a fair bit of additional horsepower to move up to the next echelon and be able to play the "next level" of games. 

One potential shortcoming of my current PC is that if I try to load a game with Direct3D activated, the frame rate is so bad that it looks more like a slideshow than a videogame.  I quickly figured out that I could run the game at full speed if I simply disabled Direct3D and used DirectDraw instead.  So, that's what I've been using since.

So, finally, my questions:

- is my statement above about how P4's covering most games and there being a rather large gap to get anything additional more or less accurate, or can I expect a modest improvement in my PC horsepower to yield a commensurate improvement in MAME?

- can anybody recommend a game that I can use to "test the limits" of what I'm currently running?  Ideally, it would be a game where, if it ran satisfactorily, you'd be able to say "you're pretty much all set... to get any further games running properly you'll need a whole other league of PC".  If I can identify such a benchmarking game, I'll shoot for being able to play that with my replacement PC.  I've still never attempted a CHD game, but then again, those might be out of my league right off the bat with what I'm running. 

- the ability to run Direct3D is something I could shoot for with a new PC, but honestly, I think the games look just fine using DirectDraw.  Is this simply a case of me  not knowing what I'm missing, or is there really value to Direct3D?  I'm using a 20" CRT display, if that matters.

     

[krick]

Some random thoughts...

-  Newer versions of MAME generally require more horsepower due to accuracy improvements in the emulation.

-  If you run MAME in Direct3D mode, the game normally runs at your desktop resolution, which requires more CPU power as well as a more powerful video card with more memory because of the way it has to scale the image up to fit your desktop resolution.  I think 64MB was a suggested minimum amount of video memory when this was discussed in the mame forums.

-  Games that use "discrete audio" simulation in modern versions of mame instead of "samples" require a lot more horsepower.  Games that fall into this category are Asteroids, Phoenix, and Donkey Kong, just to name a few.

-  Direct3D is mostly important to people who want to run with all the "artwork" turned on.  Here's an informative link that explains some of the video options in MAME...  http://mamedev.org/source/docs/newvideo.txt.html

-  Intel Core2Duo technology BLOWS AWAY an equivalently clocked Pentium 4.  You can put together a cheap core2 system for a few hundred bucks.  See attached image for a motherboard +CPU + memory for $186 at Newegg (all highly rated items).  Use your own case, power supply, and drives.  I have almost the same motherboard in my MAME PC (mine is the ASUS P5KPL-CM) and my CPU overclocked from to 3.5GHz by only changing two settings on my motherboard.  It makes for one hell of a budget MAME PC.  Bottom line, don't mess around with other people's hand-me-down junk.  It's not worth it.

[Cynicaster]

Thanks for the informative reply!

-  Direct3D is mostly important to people who want to run with all the "artwork" turned on.  Here's an informative link that explains some of the video options in MAME...  http://mamedev.org/source/docs/newvideo.txt.html

Personally, I can't stand having that artwork on, so maybe I'm not a candidate for D3D if that's the main benefit it brings.  Doesn't it also do things like apply video filters to make the images look more authentic? 

-  Intel Core2Duo technology BLOWS AWAY an equivalently clocked Pentium 4.  You can put together a cheap core2 system for a few hundred bucks.  See attached image for a motherboard +CPU + memory for $186 at Newegg (all highly rated items).  Use your own case, power supply, and drives.  I have almost the same motherboard in my MAME PC (mine is the ASUS P5KPL-CM) and my CPU overclocked from to 3.5GHz by only changing two settings on my motherboard.  It makes for one hell of a budget MAME PC.  Bottom line, don't mess around with other people's hand-me-down junk.  It's not worth it.

I understand that, for general purposes, a multi-core processor will smoke a straight P4.  But my understanding was that MAME doesn't capitalize on the multi-core... am I wrong about that?  My whole point is, whatever PC I put in my cabinet is NOTHING but a MAME PC.  Therefore it seems wasteful for me to pay for a PC that has a significant overkill factor for this specific application because I'll never stretch its legs.    I will say that $186 is well within what I would be willing to pay, so long as I saw marked benefits over what I currently have. 

I do have a case, power supply, and HDD I could use with your suggested route.  Never "built" a PC before though--is it difficult?  I'm fairly computer literate (if not super literate).

Thanks

[krick]

The reason that Core2Duo smokes a Pentium 4 has nothing to do with having multiple cores.

The Core architecture is just WAAAAY more efficient.  Even single core models smoke the P4.

I don't know if you followed the Intel/AMD CPU war back in the day, but at one point, AMD was totally cleaning Intel's clock with the Athlon64.  The only thing that Intel could do to keep up was start a clock-speed war.  Eventually, they had 3.0GHz+ P4 models that ran scorchingly hot and used tons of power.  It was like having a 100 watt light-bulb inside your computer case.

Then, along came a little laptop chip called the "Pentium M" that was basically a heavily modified Pentium III.  They were low voltage, used very little power, and kicked ass as long as you weren't doing heavy floating point operations.  I used to have one that beat the pants off both my Pentium 4 and Athlon64 in MAME benchmarks because MAME doesn't do a lot of floating point operations.  They were so popular that ASUS made adapters so you could use the Pentium M in certain desktop PCs and several companies even made desktop motherboards using laptop chipsets so you could use a Pentium M.

Intel then re-worked the Pentium M architecture to improve the floating point performance and released it as a new desktop chip called the Core Duo.  It took off like a rocket, Intel quickly killed off the P4 line, and AMD has been trying to catch up ever since.

http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions

Does MAME benefit from SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) / HT (Hyper-Threading) / dual cores?

Recent versions of MAME include a -mt switch which allows some tasks to be threaded off for use by SMP or multicore systems. Thus far the benefits from this are relatively small, because accurate emulation such as MAME strives for cannot easily be broken up into parallel sub-tasks (it would be like trying to have a baby in one month by impregnating nine women). There are exceptions of course, and MAME will support them via this mechanism in the future.

Even though MAME might not fully utilize dual cores, having a second core for windows processes allows MAME to run better.

It's not difficult to build a computer.  Especially if you're using good parts.  ASUS makes great motherboards.  I won't buy anything else.   In the end, it's all about doing your research and taking your time.  There's lots of people here (and in other forums on the Internet) that can help you put a system together.

If you've never overclocked a CPU, now is as good a time as any to start.  

I will say that $186 is well within what I would be willing to pay, so long as I saw marked benefits over what I currently have.  

If you want, we can set up a MAME benchmark test.  We can try running the same version of MAME with the -bench switch that was implemented in newer versions.  Then you can see how our systems compare.  My MAME PC is almost the same as the $186 system so it should give you a good idea what you'd be seeing with an upgrade.

Here's some information about benchmarking MAME...
http://www.mameui.info/Bench.htm

[nitz]

Is this simply a case of me  not knowing what I'm missing, or is there really value to Direct3D? 

In addition to artwork and scanline overlays not looking good, one thing I noticed about directdraw is that it's not as smooth as D3D, at least on my PC and LCD monitor. A perfect example is Donkey Kong. When I look at the attract mode in directdraw, the movement of the barrels rolling down the girders looks a bit choppy. Using D3D it's silky smooth. If you haven't noticed anything like that and don't care about artwork, directdraw is probably fine, but once I noticed that on DK, it drove me nuts! Now I simply must use D3D.

[Cynicaster]

It's not difficult to build a computer.  Especially if you're using good parts.  ASUS makes great motherboards.  I won't buy anything else.   In the end, it's all about doing your research and taking your time.  There's lots of people here (and in other forums on the Internet) that can help you put a system together.

What operating system would you recommend for a purely MAME PC?  I would assume XP?  If so, can you still buy new licenses for it?  If so, any idea what that would cost? 

If you want, we can set up a MAME benchmark test.  We can try running the same version of MAME with the -bench switch that was implemented in newer versions.  Then you can see how our systems compare.  My MAME PC is almost the same as the $186 system so it should give you a good idea what you'd be seeing with an upgrade.

Here's some information about benchmarking MAME...
http://www.mameui.info/Bench.htm

I checked out that link but I'm not sure what the numbers in those charts even represent.  If you want to recommend a specific test (command line), I'll post my results. Thanks for all the info!

[scofthe7seas]

I personally love the crispy look direct draw gives over the direct 3d look. I likes me some jaggies on the older games, makes them feel more authentic to me. As for dual-cores, they do bump the frame rate a moderate amount. (about 10 fps or so, depending on the game), but mostly it's the architecture (as was said, the miserable Pentium D that was released for about 2 minutes was essentially EXACTLY the same as a Pentium 4 HT) of the core2duo / "Pentium dual core" as it's called now, which is a budget minded core2duo. I just built a brand new MAME PC for my cab with a Pentium dual-core for about 200 dollars. I had to share a cdrom between my other Pcs though. Plus, with a newer Pc, you have to keep in mind that you won't be able to really use ANY of your old components. I have a high end PC from about 5 years ago, and the biggest hurdle stopping me from upgrading is the need to upgrade dang near everything inside. Does the -bench switch work independent of any rom, or do we need a rom to agree on for the benchmark?
If you'd like, I could price you out a very reasonable PC for your purposes
XP works pretty well, 64 bit OS/PC (all modern PCs have this) actually bump the speed up quite a bit, but windows xp 64 is moderately unstable. I just discovered that Windows 7 actually runs disturbingly quickly on a new PC, so I am currently going with that.

[LeedsFan]

Sorry for bumping this thread... but I didn't want to start a new one for my question.

I recently read that there is also a difference in the timings between D3D and DirectDraw. Is this true? Basically someone had Pacman running alongside an original cabinet and they said that the timing (or speed) was only correct in DirectDraw whereas in D3D it went off tilt. Personally I prefer D3D because it just looks nicer. On some machines I even struggle to read the Mame menu text in DirectDraw it looks that bad. But I never heard of this timing issue before.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

If that is true, my guess would be it has to do more with any particular video card's driver's implementation of D3D versus DirectDraw. Some older/cheaper video chipsets (I'm looking at you SIS) do not fully or correctly implement D3D and/or DDraw. If the time it takes to draw a frame, or the way it reports back to the system that the frame has been drawn (vsync, for example), then I could see that affecting timing (If we're talking things like emulation speed and input lag).

To the best of my knowledge I don't see how the way the final frame is rendered could have any bearing on the internal game logic emulation. Those two systems should be fully divorced from one another.