...XP 64 works great with Soft15Khz! yay! but for whatever reason XP x64 is giving poor performance compared to XP 32 and Vista x64. :-(
Hey everyone. First, here are some percentages for 6 games of varying run speeds. My preference is if you guys can help me figure out what's wrong with my configuration or confirm what I'm experiencing is normal (hopefully not).
mame-v126.exe -noautoframeskip -frameskip 0 -seconds_to_run 100 -nothrottle -nosleep -video ddraw -skip_gameinfo -effect none -nowaitvsync -noreadconfig -mt
--------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU ------------------ Pentium4 E6300 E6300 E6300 E6300
Clockspeed ----------- 2.53 2.45 2.45 2.45 2.45
OS Used -------------- XP32 XP32 Vista64 XP64 XP64
MAME executable ------ 32bit 32bit 64bit 32bit 64bit
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Killer Instinct 2 - 143.2% 312.7% 365.7% 240.6% 276.7%
Cruisin USA - 55.4% 131.9% 139.8% 96.6% 108.2%
Gauntlet Legends - 30.1% 92.7% 107.6% 72.1% 82.8%
Blitz 2k - 27.9% 89.0% 101.9% 64.1% 72.8%
Gradius 4 - 19.2% 66.1% 75.4% 49.4% 58.7%
Starblade - 37.3% 89.3% 83.6% 68.8% 64.2%
--------------------------------------------------------------------
After reading this entire thread (awesome but long), I figured it may not cost me so much to upgrade. I recently bought a used system on craigslist for $300 to stretch out performance on some mame games as well as other emulators.
My disappointment right now isn't so much that the system isn't performing as well as 4ghz and up systems mentioned in this thread but so much that there are apparently some trade off's that I hope I won't have to make (this is where you come in!)
My P4 at 2.53ghz was paired with an old AGP GeForce4 Ti. You can see the performance above. It ran nearly all of the "regular" mame games fine as you can guess but anything that required a little muscle, it was barely ok to poor.
The E6300 normally at 1.8ghz has been successfully overclocked to 2.45ghz. Although I didn't record the results above, it basically runs proportionally faster by the clock speed percentage. It is paired with an old PCI-E ATI x700 Pro and the system runs PC-6400 corsairs with blinky lights.
Staying on Windows XP 32bit there is a about a 2.5x o 3x speed improvement between the old and new pc. Then once I go to to Vista x64 and run a 64bit version of mame, I get another 10% from that. If everything worked great from here, my post may be about tweaking or planning a next CPU / motherboard purchase.
But the problem right now with Vista x64 is that SailorSat's fantastic Soft15Khz isn't working with Vista x64.... argh!!!
I've tried the latest powerstrip and haven't had any success with going below 640x480. I've read the faq but am welcomed to suggestions. The last alternative is to buy an ArcadeVGA v2 PCI-E and hope it also works with Vista x64. Even if it does, other emulators will suffer since I think the x700 pro is a superior card to the ATI 9250 the ArcadeVGA v2 is based on.
With XP x64 everything works but I get the horrible numbers you see above for both 32bit and 64bit compiles of MAME. Arghhh!!!!
My hope is that either SailorSat fixes Vista x64 issues (or tell me how I've got it misconfigured) or one of you brainy forum readers can help me out with my potentially screwed up XP x64 box. Yes, the latest ATI drivers and patches, etc have been installed. Anti-Virus off, etc. But please suggest more things to look at!
I ran these tests with 100 seconds but can do 240 as some of the more recent posts have been but it's the relative percentages to each other that I'm concerned about mostly. Thanks everyone in advance.... you're my only hope.