How does Gauntlet Legends run in Mame?

[walls83]

Im running a athlon 2.8 is that enough horse power to run it?

Thanks

[_Iz-]

Nope, I believe you need at least 10Ghz.

[walls83]

LOL

thats pretty much what I figured

[Scott84]

My friend is getting an Athlon64 3800+ in two weeks.. i plan on bringing the heavy intensive MAME Games such as Gauntlet and Blitz over to see how they run. As well as Cruisin.

[Howard_Casto]

They still won't run any better.  Mame isn't coded to take advantage of 64 bit architecture.  Also the mame devs did some tests and the performance increase compared to a similar 32 bit chip was minimal.

[elvis]

They still won't run any better.  Mame isn't coded to take advantage of 64 bit architecture.  Also the mame devs did some tests and the performance increase compared to a similar 32 bit chip was minimal.

Not to mention the fact that if you wanted real 64bit support from your OS, the flakey Windows betas currently available won't help you much at all.

Currently the only decent stable alternatives for AMD64 are non-Windows.

But yes, moot point considering that modern games are liking raw MHz over any other performance enhancing / marketdroid drivel.

[Howard_Casto]

For any of you that are wondering....  chips are going 64 bit so they can handle more impressive hardware.

The new pci express video cards and other such cards will eat up a lot of bw and due to this a main processor with more thread levels can really take advantage of it, thus allowying for more complex on-the-fly rendering with room to spare to deligate to more advanced sound cards and game logic. 

Long story short.... 64 bit chips won't make old stuff any faster, but will allow new software to have more impressive visuals and sound.  IMHO even when 64 bit chips become the norm and mame is ultimately modfied ot take advantage of them, games will still require the exact same amount of resources.

More bits equates to better multi-tasking, NOT increased speeds. 

[elvis]

For any of you that are wondering....  chips are going 64 bit so they can handle more impressive hardware.

More bits equates to better multi-tasking, NOT increased speeds. 

Err... no.  moving to 64bit won't have any affect on multitasking.  It will increase the size of data sets that can be stored within the CPU, which means access to larger data stores (ie: indexing of large databases, referencing large areas of memory, etc).

Mathematically speaking 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 (roughly 4 billion).  ie: 32bit CPUs can address 4 billion bytes of memory (4GB RAM maximum for Win32, and similar 32bit OSes).

2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 "quintillion bytes"), or ~18 ExaBytes.  Remember we are squaring the possibilities here, not doubling.

http://www.magictree.com/dataprefixes.htm

Multitasking a few consumer-level apps and 3d video cards will see no benefit from 64bit.  You will see large sized database/set access speedups, but only because CPUs won't have to do multiple passes to get to indexes of indexes for large data sets.  And by large sized databases I mean MASSIVE - as in "tax data for every single US company and citizen" massive, or "complete DNA map of entire species" massive.  Likewise for our scientific and engineering friends, accuracy to smaller decimal places will no longer need to be done in multiple calculation passes due to hardware restrictions.

PCI Express bandwidth is hardly a drop in the ocean for the sorts of things 64bit calculations will scale to.  In fact, 32bit is more than enough for the average consumer's needs for quite some time.  As mentioned, only the high-end professional arenas will need the power of 64bit n the next 5 years.

I mean honestly, when was the last time your video card needed to address 4GB of texture storage for a single scene?  Hell, I've got mates who render special effects for hollywood films, and their scenes aren't that large.  And yes, they all happily render on 32bit consumer processors.

The reason we see 128/256 bit video cards these days is not that the data accuracy needs to be that great, but instead that the pipeline from the GPU to the memory needs to send and recieve more data in parallel.  I think folks are getting mixed up with the bandwidth of a data bus compared to the storage registers of a CPU.

Quite frankly Howard, with you being a programmer I expected a better explanation than that from you.