Hardware needed to play Tekken 3 etc.

[Thestrup]

I have an arcade build with Hyperspin an a number of emulators, including MAME and PS1. The hardware is a ASRock AM1B-MDH with a AMD 5350 CPU.
I thought that would be more than enough to run all MAME and Playstation games, but when I try Tekken 3 it is super laggy and unplayable. Sooo, my question - should the HW suffice or do I have to upgrade? And if I need to upgrade, what should I look for?

It might be, that the performance could be improved by tweaking MAME, but I haven't found any silver bullet yet.

/Thestrup

[Malenko]

if you want to play tekken fire up a PSX emulator. Any semi recent PC with a marginal video card should suffice.

[BadMouth]

It depends on what revision of MAME you're using.  Newer versions  of MAME require much more horsepower than older versions.
Also if HLSL (scanline effects, etc) are enabled, it is much more demanding.
I have HLSL disabled for the more demanding 3D games.
Make sure you are using a 64 bit version of MAME if your OS is 64bit.

EDIT: eh, did a quick google of your processor...... 2.05Ghz?  MAME relies on core speed above everything else.
(In MAME, your CPU has to emulate both the processor and GPU of the original arcade machine...the GPU in your computer isn't used for anything other than effects like HLSL)
2.05Ghz is just too slow if you're expecting to run the 3D stuff from the 90's-2000's.

If you want to run 3D stuff in MAME, 3.5-4Ghz is more like it.  Newer MAME builds are also optimized for Intel processors so a 3Ghz AMD is not equal to a 3Ghz Intel as far as MAME is concerned.  Even then you may need to use a less demanding version of MAME from a few years ago to get games like Gauntlet Legends and Ridge Racer running at full speed.

Your current setup can probably run Tekken 3 full speed using zinc emulator, which utilizes your video card instead of making the CPU do all the work.
I don't know how difficult zinc rom collections are to find nowadays since nobody uses it anymore.

[Thestrup]

Thank you for the quick response.

I've just upgraded to the latest MAME (0.179), but I'll try some older versions to see if that helps. I'll also try disabling HLSL.

Yep, it's a rather crappy CPU I've bought. Actually I bought it for this setup, thinking that a quadcore would be more that enough I'll start looking for a new Intel with lots of core speed (and a new motherboard as well). In order to have some descent performance on the the PlayStation emulator, do I need to get myself an above average GPU as well (just making sure I don't make any more newbie mistakes)?

[BadMouth]

Not sure about the psx emulator.  It's been a long time since I messed with one (don't care for many psx games).
Last time I ran one it was using an old Nvidia 8600GT and it worked fine.
It wouldn't surprise me if onboard graphics could handle PS1 emulation.

If you're talking about emulating PS2, that's a whole other ballgame.

With MAME, it's a case of diminishing returns.
You can play 2,000 games with an abandoned piece of crap found next to the dumpster.
Or you can spend $300 and play a couple dozen more, or spend $800 to play a half dozen extra on top of that. 
It just depends on where you draw the line and what being able to play three or four more 3D games is worth to you.

If you like the newer 3D games, I recommend the fastest i3 or i5 you can afford and a 50ti or 60 series NVidia card (460,760,860,750ti).
The Sega Naomi games on Demul emulator get as much play as MAME on my cab.  (I'm actually running them on Makaron emulator since my PC is outdated, but it's one of those old PITA emulators that info is scarce on)

So outdated it's not relevant, but I'm running a 3.4Ghz Athlon X3, MAME v.146 & a 750ti (upgraded video card so I could play Mortal Kombat X).
It runs Tekken 3 with occasional sound skips with HLSL disabled and no scaling.  I tried MAME v.170 and it choked hard on Tekken and all the late 90's 3D shmups.
It won't run the Naomi shmups in Demul without horrible slowdowns, but it will run them with an old emulator called Makaron.
So I'm not recommending my hardware, but there it is as a point of reference.
It also demonstrates how dozens of games will run full speed in an older version of MAME, but be completely unplayable in newer versions because of MAME becoming so much more demanding.

[lilshawn]

emulation is one of those things that highly depends on what kinds of streamlining the person has don on that particular game or system.

I have a ridiculously overclocked FX9590 based system and can play everything, even most Wii games just fine.  But I have issues with some gamecube games. There is no real reason for it on my end, but whoever is working on emulating a particular piece of the original hardware or some render engine part just...isn't. some games video work good while the sound is glitchy or delayed. others sound 100% accurate, but the framerate or render glitches are horrible. it's all in where that developer put their effort in on that particular game or piece of hardware.

emulation is highly CPU intensive. it takes many many extra steps to do something original hardware did in 1 step. you benefit greatly by not having MORE cores, but instead higher single CORE speeds. a 3ghz or 3.5ghz dual core CPU could easily out perform a 2 ghz 4 core CPU in emulation.

I think you'd find in your system, MAME will saturate 1 or 2 (depending on how you are setup) of your 4 cores at 100% while having the remaining cores twiddling their thumbs doing nearly nothing.

[shaolindrunkard]

Like Malenko said PSX Emulation isn't very demanding you can most likely run Tekken 3 right now on your current rig as long as you have any decent video card from the last 10 years

[burn_654]

It may be worth trying Tekken Tag for PS2 as well - I wouldn't be surprised if it ran better than Mame Tekken 3.

[Thestrup]

Finally got around to test the PS1 version and after some initial tweaking of GPU plugin it ended up running smoothly. I'll just turn to the PlayStation emulator, whenever Tekken 3 needs to be taken for a spin.

Thank you for the help guys!