MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Anybody have MAME benchmarks with a 5900 or 5950 cpu?

> But the bench numbers linked to by Stiletto are what I was worried about. The Intel
> benches kick the 5800x's ass all the way across the board. Hell, sf2 shows 1000FPS
> difference! I'd sure like to compile Atmosphere-nx a bit faster, but nowhere near as
> much as I want emulated MAME things to not burp and stutter...

That's the thing though, MAME is pretty much at the point where anything that even has a chance at running full speed will do so on just about any high-end system from the past 3 years.

It's important to keep in mind that the benchmarks are from power-up, which with some of the higher-end arcade systems, puts less load on MAME than actually driving the game itself. The bench runs are invariably an average, too. Neither Intel nor AMD are going to get you to 100% speed on most Naomi games, much less Aleck 64 or Chihiro games, or possibly even Model 3 once people start making the video hardware more accurate. Even if the benchmarks indicate that e.g. Sushi Bar will run over 100% speed, the most likely scenario is that it won't once the game gets past the initial power-on sequence.

The next-most-powerful systems are IT Eagle (Virtual Pool and the Golden Tee Fore! series), and Atari Vegas (the 3D Gauntlet games, Rush 2049, Road Burners, CART Fury, NBA Gold / Sportstation, War: Final Assault), and both are within the capabilities of relatively modern systems from either AMD or Intel.

The wild card here is particularly complex discrete games, or games with complex discrete audio. Something like Pong isn't really representative of just how hard the netlist system can beat on a CPU, and while Space Fury from the segag80v driver is there, there are other games (like Exidy's 'Star Fire') that can be pretty ugly when all of the different sound effects are running full-tilt.

The most important thing is to know exactly what you're planning on running with MAME, and what your other use cases are. Switch emulators, and emulators for other modern systems, are increasingly making decent use of multi-threading because it's actually worthwhile in those cases, since the systems themselves are modern enough to be multi-core or multi-threaded. If you're planning on doing PC gaming, then it's also worth noting that the games are starting to skew in a more heavily multithreaded direction.

At the end of the day you're already in a high enough performance tier that is (ironically) a bit of a wasteland when it comes to any MAME-supported titles that will be pushed past full speed, so you'd be better off focusing on what else you plan to do with the machine.