MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: MAME 0.176 on Raspberry Pi benchmarks

> > Well it's interesting to see somebody has done this, however, benchmarks with the
> > video and sound disabled aren't really representative of a real world use case...
> >
> > > ChoccyHobNob has released some RasPi benchmarks today with current MAME, showing
> > the
> > > performance increases across the generations of Raspberry Pi's. Be sure to check
> it
> > > out!
> > >
> > > Says ChoccyHobNob:
> > > There are a lot of accusations about MAME being slow, about how it is a
> > documentation
> > > project, not an exercise in performance tuning. Most people seem to think that a
> 20
> > > year old version of MAME is the best you can hope for out of a Raspberry Pi. I’m
> > here
> > > to say that’s not the case. If you set your expectations at a reasonable level,
> you
> > > tweak your settings in a sensible way, and you overclock wherever you can, you
> will
> > > probably be pleasantly surprised.
> > > ...
> > > MAME benchmarks are run without using the display or sound devices, this keeps
> the
> > > benchmarks purely about MAME’s performance, and tries to take any bottlenecks
> with
> > > the host system out of the loop. In the case of the Raspberry Pi, the GPU gives
> the
> > > performance a pretty good beating, meaning that games need to run quite a bit
> > faster
> > > than 100% to be playable.
> > >
> > > http://choccyhobnob.com/articles/benchmarks-for-mame-on-raspberry-pi/
>
> Sound being disabled has no bearing on emulation speed - it is still emulated. The
> video is the same, however, may the effect may range from a small bit to a large
> amount depending on how complex video is. The benchmarks are largely to gauge CPU
> worthiness anyway, I believe.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

What I'm saying is that (and the post even mentions it) is that the simply process of outputting the video to the screen is very costly on the Pi and drags performance down quite a lot.

In terms of real world benchmarks the only thing anybody is going to care about is the end result, and, even with the warning in place, it's likely these benchmarks will end up making the hardware look more capable than it actually is.