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Old PIII for MAME, AGP card doesn't help
TheManuel:
The AGP being hard wired in the motherboard makes a lot of sense. After all, why create a new interface when you can take advantage of the existing AGP port. That is probably what is going on here.
This setup should run most games full speed through CPS-2 with relatively recent MAME versions. Like I said, I will use older versions for the tougher cookies.
Thank you everyone.
SirPeale:
Also, try lowering your resolution. Mame doesn't like higher res.
TheManuel:
I have a bunch of ini files with different resolutions and refresh rates to get all games looking right on a PC monitor. For the more taxing games, I use lower resolutions.
You are right. With older computers, higher resolutions take quite a hit.
u_rebelscum:
What video card did you add in? What was the onboard chip set? (or motherboard if you don't know the chip set.)
Some of the really old cards were slower than the at-the-time CPUs doing the work on at-the-time PC games; some even used the CPU more than some onboard chips. Any of these cards would be even worse with mame. (You probably aren't using one of these since the drop is so minor, but maybe the next generation?)
There are many many points that might be at work with the onboard vs AGP card:
a. Mame currently favors directX 9.0 tuned chips & drivers with mame's default settings. If your card is only dX 8.0, mame automatically drops down to use that (but it's not as good AFAIK). Worse is if your card says it does dX 9.0, but does it poorly; on these cards it might be better to set mame to use 8.0 (or see next point).
b. Mame currently favors direct3D tuned cards with mame's default settings. If your card does directDraw better than direct3D 9.0 and 8.0 (see above point), set mame to use dd instead of d3d.
c. OTOH/Also, Mame now defaults to use windows desktop's resolution. If your card isn't powerful enough for that res with d3d or dd (see above two points), enable switchres and set mame to use a lower resolution (one that your card can use well). (This point is an expansion of Peale's post.)
d. Mame uses only a few parts of d3d, so if the card is better than the onboard chip at stuff mame doesn't use, it's of no use. (Ditto with dd if you use that.)
e. A few onboard chips are pretty good, and even fewer steal little to no resources. Rare, but it's possible your onboard chip really is better at d3d @ your resolution. (IOW, you shouldn't treat generalizations as absolute truth.)
f. As mentioned by others, video drivers might be at work, and effecting all the above five points.
I know I missed other points, but.... 2 fps is less than 7%, and with all the variables going on, that's not outside the range of error IMO. If you ran benchmarks a few times for, say, 120 seconds each (mame -str 120...) and the change was over 5%, I'd agree something is going on.
In the end, you'll get higher speed increases with a fast CPU. Sometimes an earlier version of mame is faster, but not always (again, generalizations can be not true, sometimes).
BTW, discrete sound emu/sim can take a lot of CPU power. You should be okay, but don't be too surprized if your CPU isn't fast enough for a few discrete sound games.
BTW2:
--- Quote from: xmenxmen on November 16, 2007, 11:19:10 am ---Also remember, mame is completely cpu dependent, so gpu will have no effect even if you had a 8800GTX, it's all cpu power when for the video processing.
--- End quote ---
Not exactly true.
Mame is CPU depentdent on emulation, so GPU will not help on emulation.
Mame, however, can and does use the GPU for none emulation stuff, like convert the original res to the displayed res, artwork, scanlines, ect. This is even more true now than it was years ago.
So a slow GPU can slow down mame, but a super-fast GPU will not be faster with mame than a good-enough GPU.
TheManuel:
Lots of intersting stuff there, u.
The MB southbridge chipset is VIA VT82C596 and the onboard video is NVidia Riva TNT2. This is an HP PIII 800MHz that was donated to me by co-workers for my arcade project along with an Athlon T-Bird 800MHz. The video card came from the latter and is a GeForce2 MX/MX 400 (powered by). Coincidentally, the Athlon PC runs the game at the same speed as the PIII when they both have the same video card. The Athlon's MB does not have integrated video.
I'll address your comments by letters:
a. I don't know if even DX 8.0 was available when these products were made ::)
b. I will play with switching back between D3D and DDraw. I always use DDraw thinking it would be faster by default.
c. I am sure I am switching resolutions to 600x480x60Hz when running the benchmark (the monitor tells me from the OSD)
d. I was hoping that simply having the card, the CPU would be freed of some load but maybe all I'm freeing is the memory of which the computer has plenty enough for that game (512MB)
e. Again, I have been trying this with DDraw but I could very well be a case of a very crappy card being outperformed by onboard video
f. Drivers are always a possibility. I went from scratch and uninstalled all the old drivers for both, onbard and AGP card and then installed fresh the latest drivers for that card and the result was the same.
As far as a margin of error for the benchmark, it would be less than 1FPS in this case. I always start the game, insert coins and press P1 to go to the character selection screen. 10 out of ten times I get the same number of FPS in each case so it is pretty clear that the total variability is dominated by the video cards and not the measurement system.
I have always been aware that MAME is mostly CPU dependant. By adding the card I was simply hoping to give it a little boost. I can't count how many people give the advice of buying a separate card rather than onboard video to "not steal away from the CPU". I am pretty convinced by now that this is rubbish. Video cards are for PC games, video rendering etc...
Thanks for all your comments.
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