Anyone running an APU from AMD?

[jekbrown]

I'm considering running one of these CPU/GPU chips in my new MAME cabinet that I am still in the planning stages of.  The monitor will be an LCD, so I'll prolly be manipulating the video a bit with scan lines and scaling and crap like that.  Anyone using an APU?  Hows the performance?  Up to the job?  My cabinet will mostly feature late 80s - 90s arcade games.  I'm not all that interested in the newer stuff aside from a few shooters.  Mainly just wondering how appropriate of a CPU/GPU option this is for MAME systems... 

[jekbrown]

...maybe these are to new for a MAME forum...I know a lot of you guys use older harder or hand-me-down parts from primary PCs in the house. 

[doom216]

I have built a pc for a client that had one of these. He chose the a8 3850 for the cpu, runs at 2.9 ghz. As with all builds I test them with various programs for stability. I tested it with mameUI64 and ran through a few fighters like mvsc, mk2, mk1 etc, all ran well with vsync and tripple buffer but no hlsl. The APU in these chips does not have enough grunt to use it. Personally, I show a 45-52% Gpu load with all hlsl feature I could think of and thats on a GTX 570. Hope this helped you.

[jekbrown]

Just how important is hlsl?  I mean, it doesn't seem like all that many people here are using $300+ gfx cards for the MAME set up...   

[SavannahLion]

Just how important is hlsl?  I mean, it doesn't seem like all that many people here are using $300+ gfx cards for the MAME set up...   

That's because MAME doesn't actually depend on the GPU outside of a basic buffer. Most (all?) of the heavy rendering work is done on the CPU.

[jekbrown]

(scratching chin)  I think I may build a MAME system using one of these....and if I ever need to turn on so much video processing that it really buggers things up, I'll just add a gfx card then.   

[larsoncc]

I'm curious - will you be running this on a 15khz monitor, or a computer monitor? 

My expectation is that the built in graphics in this case will probably work fine, given that the ATI chipsets seem to have fewer issues with Soft-15khz than the GeForce chips.  Heck, the latest GeForce chips need a hardware dongle solution, according to the monitor forum... it's sad.

The APU solutions are still being beat fairly handily by anything with discrete graphics though.  The APU seems to be "better than other integrated graphics" not "better than graphics".  You might be better off getting a stock Athlon quad and a $50 video card for the same price.

Seems to me that if they lowered the price on these, just $25-50, they'd be "the" choice for low end system builders tho.

[jekbrown]

Definitely going to use a 720p LCD TV, rotated to verticle.

Yeah, I know, not arcade authentic, but the little bit of dabbling I have done with MAME so far (a few years ago I ran 19XX and Strikers 1945 on my HTPC with a 61" DLP TV for a display) suggest that it doesn't bother me to much.  Is it mainly the really old games (80s) that are supposed to look like crap on anything but an arcade monitor?

If I run a bunch of video processing stuff (to make things look better on the LCD) in the future, I could get a graphics card then.  From what doom216 is saying is accurate (and there's no reason to believe otherwise!), this new image manipulation stuff like HLSL can suck up some pretty serious GPU power.  I refuse to spend $300 on a graphics card to get those goodies...I'd rather wait a year until better perf can be had for $100.    In the meantime, I could at least get things going and start playing on the cheap.

Of course, it's gonna take me awhile to build the cab, get the TV etc anyway....so maybe I should just wait to see what will be available when it's time to actually assemble the PC part of the system.   

[SavannahLion]

I generally build the pc portion last. It's too easy to spend hours playing tweaking your configuration on an incomplete cab. I have a laptop that I use for testing hardware if need be.

There are exceptions though. My current WIP is very closely tied to what hardware I choose to stuff inside. But that kind of project is probably something I'll never try again, so many things have gone wrong already that I'm this close to just dumping it.

[larsoncc]

Yeah, always wait on the PC portion of the system.  Seems like prices are always coming down.  At a minimum, the prices aren't likely to go UP.

I was just wondering if you were getting one of those fancy arcade LCDs (which, you're not, so forget half of what I wrote).  I think you can hook them up like the old CGA arcade stuff, and hence have all the same 15khz hassles, LOL.  You don't have to of course...  but you could.  They're also really expensive, but if you some day bought an arcade mobo, you could wire up a JAMMA harness.  All stuff sane humans probably aren't interested in doing

I'm no arcade purist.  I have a Neo Geo cab and an extra computer.  Makes the arcade far more useful to me, without harming the original equipment.  Most of my gaming is on the big screen with a controller...

Whatever you end up building, the ATI chipsets, in general, just seems to work better for Arcade emulation, if these forums are any indication.  I'm running NVidia in everything I own, and have had some headaches other people don't seem to have.

[equlizer]

Im currently building a cabinet using this mobo:
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX32364%28ME%29.aspx

Running 6gigs of ram and "ZERO" problems.  ive thrown over 100 games at it while on the test bed and its smooth as butter.  I want to try super street fighter 4 arcade but im afraid

[jekbrown]

sounds like a nice system amigo.  My arcade career pretty much ended with SFII Turbo...so if my MAME cab can do everything up to that point, I'm fine with it.  The only newer games I would ever play are 2d shooters...so I should be good to go. 

What kind of monitor are you using?  If it's LCD, got any image processing running?  scan lines and all that fun stuff?