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Old PIII for MAME, AGP card doesn't help
TheManuel:
I have an old PIII 800MHz that I want to use for a MAME cab and obviously it is pretty slow. One of the things I did to try and help it along was to add an old AGP 2x video card to see if it helped. The results is that in umk3, the fps went from 30 to 28.
I was hoping that adding a video card would actually help it, not make it worse since, as I have seen often quoted, integrated video "steals resources away from the computer". I am starting to believe this is BS.
I had the exact same thing happen with an even slower computer (Celeron 700MHz) which did not actually have AGP. I installed a PCI video card and the performance went down instead of up. Somebody in a MAME forum told me it was because of the PCI interface but now, years later, I try the same trick with an AGP card (granted, 2x) and the result is similar.
Does anyone have any idea about what is going on?
Am I missing something?
Thanks.l
TOK:
You didn't say what version of MAME you're using. I have a bartop running on a P3/933. The best way to improve performance is to run an older version of MAME. I'm running .84 and it runs great. If you're running anything from .100 on, you're never going to get good performance out of it.
MaximRecoil:
I don't know why your performance decreased with the video card as opposed to onboard video, but I would suggest that you run a version of MAME that is from the same time frame that your processor was current in. Something from the .5x to early .6x range should be about right.
ahofle:
Did you disable the onboard video in the bios after you installed the AGP card?
Anyway, you aren't going to pick up much in terms of MAME performance (currently) with a better video card. Try an older version of MAME as TOK suggested.
TheManuel:
Thanks guys.
That is my current plan, to find an older version of MAME for those games that don't run at full speed and the latest version for all the rest to take advantage of the discrete sound improvements of recent releases.
I guess for CPS-3 I am SOL :badmood:.
It still bugs me that a dedicated video card would lower my performance. It just does not make sense. I know MAME does not make much use of the video card but at the very least I would have expected the system to be less burdened. The first thing I did was to see if the onboard video could be disabled through BIOS but it is an HP computer with the unfriendly BIOS. Oh well.