MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - D3D and DRAW performance, and bechmarking

I'd like to ask what is the difference between benchmarking using "mame gamename -bench" and "mame gamename -seconds_to_run". I guess the first one measures merely the cpu performance emulating the game whilest the later shows the real performance. Is this right?

I've been doing some tests with a Core2Duo and a i5, both slightly overclocked. The first one is using MAME 32 bits in Windows XP 32 bits and the i5 is using MAME 64 bits under Windows XP 64 bits. The higher clock of the i5, the most modern technology and the 64 bits are evident in the results (not so sure about 4 cores vs 2). However, when using "seconds_to_run", you can see that the i5 performe worse than the core2duo (¿?¿?). The only reason I can figure out is that the core2duo is using D3D with stretch and the i5 is using ddraw in native resolutions.

How can the differences be so huge? Is really D3D such a big advantage over ddraw? I though it would be the other way around, since in ddraw the resolution is low and there's no need to stretch or use filters than could kill performance.

Finally, I've tried with "-seconds_to_run" using the multithread option and the performance boost was quite important. However, the sound is completelly distorted. Is this normal? Any way to fix the problem?

The benchmarks:

E8500, 3,6ghz 32 bits, D3D

mame pinkswts -bench 120: 312
mame ibarablk -bench 120: 232
mame pinkswts -seconds_to_run 120: 99,43
mame ibarablk -seconds_to_run 120: 99,96

i5, 3,8ghz 64 bits, DDRAW

mame pinkswts -bench 120: 440
mame ibarablk -bench 120: 316
mame pinkswts -seconds_to_run 120: 95,34
mame ibarablk -seconds_to_run 120: 97,01