Posted: 9/24/2012 1:38 PM
Post subject: Running slowly. Is it just my computer showing its' age?
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BigBoct
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Editor, Former player
Joined: 8/9/2007
Posts: 1692
Location: Tiffin/Republic, OH
Trying to watch adelikat's current submission of The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy, I only get about 40 FPS. Also tried Super Metroid to test a different core, and I get 50-55 FPS on that. Get full speed on the Genesis core, though. My specs: Windows XP Professional SP3 x86 Intel Core Duo processor, 1.82GhZ x2 cores (rated 2.7 GhZ) 2gb DDR2 RAM Intel 950GMA graphics (shared with RAM, 224mb max allocation, Pixel Shader 2.0) I installed .Net Framework and DirectX separately AFTER running the dependency installer.
Previous Name: boct1584
Posted: 9/24/2012 3:16 PM
(Edited: 9/24/2012 3:28 PM)
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creaothceann
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Location: Germany
Cores aren't comparable to each other. For example GB will be faster than SNES, and more accuracy will generally be slower. It also depends on what features the game uses (e.g. cartridge coprocessors - see the grid in Megaman X2's intro, it gets my Phenom X6 down to 20fps).
Posted: 9/24/2012 3:19 PM
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3598)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee
TASer of 2010 NES TASer of 2010 DS TASer of 2010 Arcade TAS of 2010 NES TASer of 2008 NES TAS of 2008 Funny TAS of 2008 TASer of 2007 NES TASer of 2007 Funny TAS of 2007
Yes, the core speeds vary wildly, and games within each core can vary. For instance, smb is a good deal faster than flintstones due to the mappers each use. In summary though, the nes core is the slowest of the cores we have. And 1.x ghz simply isn't enough to power it to full fps. The 2nd slowest is snes of course, because it is bsnes. It should be common knowledge at this point that this core is very slow but very accurate. For the SNES core though, try turning off rewind. That should be enough to get you to full fps
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Posted: 10/10/2012 6:34 PM
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natt
Editor, Emulator Coder, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
with the most recent release, SGB is now our slowest core by a good margin. that isn't likely to change, either; actually emulating an SGB (not what VBA does) is very cpu intensive, as it's an entire gameboy plus an entire snes all at once
Posted: 10/28/2012 4:51 PM
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SaxxonPike
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Joined: 6/8/2005
Posts: 236
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
I'm really curious, what is it about the emulation that actually makes it slow? I know it's due to accuracy, but what specifically takes so much processing time?
Music - https://www.sanxion7.com Code - https://github.com/SaxxonPike
Posted: 10/28/2012 6:00 PM
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adelikat
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee
TASer of 2010 NES TASer of 2010 DS TASer of 2010 Arcade TAS of 2010 NES TASer of 2008 NES TAS of 2008 Funny TAS of 2008 TASer of 2007 NES TASer of 2007 Funny TAS of 2007
I suspect the CPU core is the slowest part. But there is no singular reason, just a number of small reasons:
    A mapper/board system that's very organized, at the cost of some speed (using a boardbase and inheritance all of which happens in memory read/writes) An APU that is well structured and still rough draft-ish that could probably have some optmizations. A very well organized PPU at the cost of speed, for instance, each bit of the PPU regs are their own properties in an object, for isntance. It is written in C# A CPU that passes every accuracy test, each test had some kind of speed cost, but maybe some of that could be optimized? Dunno A core dev who doesn't care if it is fast, though there really is no low hanging fruit
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects