Main > Main Forum
Intel vs. AMD (MAME Emulation)
c0dehunter:
Hello,
I just build a custom PC with the following components:
AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz
ASRock 880GM-LE FX motherboard
MSI HD 4350 Radeon
8GB DDR3 RAM
Windows XP Professional x86
And I wanted to know if my system (CPU specifically) is fast enough for a MAME gaming experience. I posted this message on the official MAMEWorld forums, and the user/moderator (programmer of MAMEUI?)John IV responded as such:
"Games benefit more from x64 builds of MAME running on 64bit operating systems. Some games do *a lot* better on Intel solutions. THat said you should be fine for 90%+ of Mame games at that speed.
See some bench runs below.
http://www.mameui.info/Bench.htm"
The thing that I don't understand is that how can a 31 years old game, such as FROGGER run any faster/better on an Intel platform and 'smoke' an AMD system?
I was under impression that MAME relies only on pure CPU speed (and not other fancy modern CPU features). My AMD FX-4100 Zambezi is 3.6GHz which can be run at 4.00Ghz with turbo and proper overclocking. Isn't 4.00GHz not good enough for MAME? :angry: :badmood:
Your thoughts are greatly appreciated! :notworthy:
404:
I personally stopped looking at mame benchmarks a long time ago. I don't believe any benchmarks are going to give you a good indication of exactly how a game is going to run on YOUR particular hardware. Every hardware config is different. In my opinion, i think it all boils down to running the game on your hardware. If it runs at 100%, why bother with any other benchmarks.
You have to understand that Mame, as with many emulators is geared towards accuracy. Mame always goes through changes in order to continue the quest to make a more accurate emulator. Mame focuses on emulating the original hardware and not necessarily emulating the game. Arcades of the time used many different chips in many different configurations none of which are anything like modern day Intel, AMD or other x86 processors. There are times where mame basically has to emulate as many as a dozen different chips that were contained on one arcade board in order for a game to run.
With that said, I found that even modern day mame builds can easily run nearly all non 3D games on a sub 2.0ghz single core processor. If you want to simply run the classics, you can use older versions of mame which have less updates to the rendering engine. Starting with build 0.107, mame used a brand new rendering engine which required more CPU power to run games that were already running at 100%
As for Intel vs AMD. It is true and it is what it is. I personally use AMD for nearly everything. Using a 64bit OS and 64bit builds of mame helps as well.
capsule:
My current 1UP MAME cab runs fine on an AMD Athlon XP 2500+.
As a reference, KI runs almost smoothly. Anything below (like Metal Slug X, SF2 Alpha 3, ...) runs like a charm.
MAME runs probably better on Intel out of the box because it's optimized for Intel CPUs but you could recompile it and optimize it for AMD CPUs.
My new cab will run an AMD A8 3800 series, I'm pretty sure it won't make any difference with an Intel equivalent, certainly not to run frogger ;D
mytymaus007:
i5 2500K :lol :lol $100 even more power i7 2600K best bang for your buckjust as good as the highest end i7's. AMD are they still around! :dunno
Haze:
AMD have been lagging quite badly behind for a while now in terms of raw performance.
They also seem to have hedged their bets on multi-core / threaded performance rather than individual core performance more strongly than Intel which is no good at all for MAME / emulation (which for most cases relies on the performance of just a single core)
running a 32-bit version of XP on a 64-bit system with 8gb of RAM is just stupid however you look at it tho, you're just throwing a very significant amount of your cash down the drain.