P166 vs Cel366 Performance Tests - AdvanceMame

[MonitorGuru]

Edit: Adding more tests.

I accumultated a few systems to be thrown by a local computer tech. As I'm attempting to get a few machines up and running with arcade monitors and loving the performance that DOS+AdvanceMame can give (over the bloat of DirectX+Windows to PC Monitor with scaling/etc..).  I had previously done some tests on various AMD chips running at stock and various overclocks (Duron 600 + 850 o/c'd up to about 1 GHz, and Athlon 750 o/c'd up to about 1GHz too).  I'll post those results later.

Anyway, here are the 2 systems and confirgurations and info.  The software was identical--I just swapped the hard drive, only the hardware was different.

System 1: P166, 16 meg 72 pin simm (EDO?) memory
System 2: Celeron 366, 32 meg 168 pin DIMM PC66 memory
System 3: Athlon 750 (100mhz 7.5 multiplier), 184 pin 128 meg DDR memory (running at 100 MHZ though)

Video card: Jaton 67P (Trident Providia 9685 / 4 meg ram) (system 1, 2, 3)

System 3NewVideo: Tried 4 OTHER video cards and got MUCH better results. Oddly they were all equal. The cards were: Elsa Riva 128 PCI 4 meg, Radeon 7000 PCI 32 meg, nVidia Quattro Pro AGP 32meg, nVidia GeForce2GTS 32 meg AGP.



Software: Dos 7 from Win98Se boot disc, AdvanceMame .83

Note: I also tried 1 2 meg Diamond Stealth S3 Virge/VX 86C988 card and it couldn't output arcade resolutions.


Performance: [System 1]  (System 2) System 3  {System3NewVideo}
BTIME         [73-81%] (138-146%) 254-262% {339-354%}
CENTIPEDE [60-72%] (147-155%) 232-233% {312-314%}
ARKANOID [83-84%]  (158-170%) 250-251% {327-328%}

Summary: A P166/16 meg took about 3 minutes to load mame and the game. More memory would have helped considerably on boot up time.  However performace was 60% of full speed.... unacceptable. More ram would probably not have helped this.

A Celeron 366/32 meg took about 1 minute to load mame and the game. Again, more memory would help boot time.  Performace was more than acceptable..

An Athlon 750/128 meg took about 20 seconds to load mame and the game.  Note: I set the cpu to memory clock at 100/100. When set at 100/133, I lost 1% performance.

Granted, I only picked a few classic games, but ones I am likely to play.

Therefore I think that if you are looking to connect to an arcade monitor (use AdvanceMame) you will want to get at least a Pentium II/Celeron solution (266/300 MHz MINIMUM) with at least 64 meg of ram to make it playable/bearable.

I'll post my other notes later from the AMD's but IIRC, these games played at about 250% on a Duron 600 and about 400% on a Duron 1GHZ with 128 meg of ram.  I'd strongly suggest looking at AMD systems instead of Intel.


I will retest the P166 and Cel366 with the other video cards.. I'd expect to see those numbers above 200% performance on the celeron and perhaps 100% on the P166, lowering the minimum bar for hardware with the better video cards. Again, I was surprised a 1996 nVidia Riva 128 4 meg PCI card performed IDENTICAL to a Radeon 7000 and GeForce2 GTS, both 32 meg!  Clearly the trident PCI I started with was the runt of the litter, though it had acceptable results .

[paigeoliver]

can you rerun that test with advancemame .53 or a similar vintage?

[SirPoonga]

Heh, I could give you results of a dual cely366 running linux/xmame    And overclocked to dual 550 if needed

[MonitorGuru]

I will try to get to testing .53 this weekend, as well as get results for Duron and Athlon processors running at default speed/multiplier as well as overclocking them (600 to 1000 MHz range)

I assume .53 is avail from AdvanceMame's site via a simple URL change or old rev page?

I will also throw in a few different video cards to.  

Oh yeah, and these tests were done using output correctly oriented on the screen (in other words -rol used to make the vertical fill the screen correctly)

[MonitorGuru]

Update. I have more numbers. I will update the original post.

I ran the same tests on an Athlon 750 with the same video cards, then popped in some other cards and got more interesting numbers.  Also tried running at 100/100 (CPU/Ram) and 100/133. As expected, a loss of about 1% performance when ram wasn't running at the same speed as the CPU.

I won't get to overclock tests or any possibility of Duron 600/850 tests for a while as I need another board and need to do tons of chip swaps.  But the above info should give you some hope as to what you can run on classic hardware with Arcade VGA.

And you don't even need the latest and greatest AGP 32 meg video card. One 4 meg PCI card performed EXACTLY THE SAME and 2 new cards (while another 4 meg PCI did perform slower).

[lokki]

Do you have smartdrv loaded.

I'm really surprised to hear it takes 3 minutes to load the game....
(even on those systems).
Edit. Missed the memory on those systems.I think you would need 64 Mb at least. But 32 may do the trick.

What command line parameters are you using to run?

[MonitorGuru]

Yes.  1 meg allocated to smart drive in all the above tests.  I bumped it to 4 meg and it did lower it to a little over 2 minutes on the P166 with 16 meg, BUT caused swapping out when the game loaded for the first minute or so before numbers stablized.

AdvanceMame.83 is about a 32 meg file, thus the long time to load.


Command line params:  AdvanceMame -rol %1

Preconfigured all arcade modes for arcade monitor.

More data later... hopefully SOMEONE finds these anal number taking worthwhile when considering a system.

[paigeoliver]

Please test older versions though, as using new mame on old hardware doesn't make sense, as new mame i incredibly slower than older mames.