> One thing you can do is disable frame limiting, allowing Supermodel to run as fast it can. Then compare. On very fast systems, it might become difficult to control the games, so I recommend creating a save state just before a scene that is known to slow the emulator down
Yeah, I realized that after trying some stuff. Managed to get 70fps average on daytona with 50mhz. The 32bits version ran at about 55fps average. That-s a 15fps increment in my rig. Also, for some laughs, I got 95fps average on Star Wars Trilogy on the 64bits version without frame limiting :P
> For the most part, the games are going to be timed off of IRQ events anyway (with some exceptions), so as long as enough cycles are executed per frame (and this is what you're asking about, I think), the result will be indistinguishable from running at the full 66 or 100 MHz.
Yeah, I realized that after thinking about it.
> What constitutes "enough" is virtually impossible to tell except through experimentation but all the games are doing similar things each frame, so there's probably some acceptable threshold we can identify. Your findings suggest that it may be 50 MHz, particularly for Step 1.5 and 1.0. Assuming the correct clock frequency is 66 MHz, a very crude estimate would suggest that the CPU spends about a quarter of the time doing nothing particularly useful.
Yes. 50mhz is mostly ok in most games, however there was one game that I didnt managed to run at fullspeed: Virtua Striker 2 '98. That game made me push the ppc clock to 58mhz and the most fps I could get were only 54. The game still felt kinda slow, so I would assume that VS2 really pushes the Model 3 hardware compared to other Step 2.0-2.1 games, I tried with more clock speed, but it was useless since I was pushing my cpu too much. The only "bad thing" is that the emulator uses only 1 and a half of my 6 cores.
Also, this may be an interesting question: I know that sound will come later, and Im not in a hurry either, but are we gonna emulate the sound in separate core? I know synchronization can be a bitch sometimes when doing multi-threading stuff, but this would help a lot speed-wise.