Posted by Sir Pimp on 5, 2000 at 3:19 PM:
In Reply to: AMD vs Intel on Emu's... posted by xiaou2 on 5, 2000 at 12:14 AM:
I discovered a major improvement in performance can be achieved when using an AMD platform (K6 or Athlon) if the the user installs the AGP miniport driver appropriate to the system. There are two things this driver accomplishes:
1) it enables AGP functionality for Windows 9x. This does NOT improve MAME performance.
2) when this driver is present and the user is running MAME, the driver is doing something called write-combining. This basically has the effect of cutting the amount of traffic across the video bus in half and can result in major performance improvements. This is very likely the reason you're seeing such a big difference in games like MK. Intel platforms on Windows don't have this problem because Microsoft provides the driver as part of the OS.
I have an Athlon 600 and am getting 165% of the full speed. Do yourself a favor and check out this option.
Finally, floating point performance has nothing to do with MAME. At one point in time I had an email conversation with the author of Hive (another emulator). When I asked him about emulation of games like SmashTV, he told me that floating point is not used in the emulation of raster based games using these older arcade processors. This was confirmed by a software developer that I work with.
K6-2 will also benefit from the stuff I mentioned above, but I'd be lying if I told you that it will perform as well as the P-II at the same speed. P-II had the advantage of a much higher performing L2 cache than the K6-2. The K6-2+ or K6-3 would likely perform much better given its on-chip cache design.
The obvious implication here is that Windows 98 is the best platform for running MAME. If the system BIOS doesn't enable write-combining, then it's the AGP miniport that will have to come to the rescue for performance.
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: There is a big difference between Intel and Amd.
: I used to own a k62 500 and It still didnt beat friends PII 450.
: Also, when upgrading to Athlon 650 - I had problems here and there so decided to switch to PIII 550. The PIII Smoked the Athlon and ran Mortal Komat at 120% (full throttle all options maxed). The Athlon only got 85%! and that was 100mhz faster with faster 133mhz memory...ect.
: Someone suggested that its because the software is set to take advantage of Intels processors... but even so... I find it hard to believe so much difference. It could also be due to bad motherboard design as well. Maybe Intels floating point power is just plain superior... Or maybe they are really faster than what they say they are? (or AMDs are slower than what they say they are! :)
: I think Amd is good if you need a cheap chip with decent speeds... but if you want power for emu's... stick to Pentiums.
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: PS: Ive got an ABit BE-62 MB... and its really flys. Ive noticed that some mb's are slow and cause processing power to drop dramatically.