Console Emulators: Our Newest Benchmark
by Derek Wilson on March 3, 2004 11:33 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Testing Setup
| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | AMD Athlon 64 3000+ AMD Athlon 64 3400+ Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 3.2EGHz |
| RAM: | 2 x 512Mb OCZ 3500 Platinum Ltd |
| Hard Drive(s): | Seagate 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer) |
| Video AGP & IDE Bus Master Drivers: | VIA Hyperion 4.51 (12/02/03) Intel Chipset Drivers |
| Video Card(s): | Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB ATI Radeon 9800 XT ATI Radeon 9600 XT NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 |
| Video Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 4.2 NVIDIA ForceWare 56.56 (WHQL) |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP1 |
| Motherboards: | Intel D875PBZ (Intel 875P Chipset) FIC K8-800T (VIA K8T800 Chipset) |
The games that we tested are Final Fantasy IX and Gran Turismo 2 (along with a preview of things to come in The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker).
The only important issue to note when looking at the performance data is that FRAPS reports sometimes framerates that are between 50% and 25% of what the plugin reports. From what we understand, the game sees between two and four vblank interrupts before it draws one screen (meaning the game doesn't update the screen on every vblank). For Final Fantasy IX, we generally see a 25% framerate during MDEC playback, 30% while traveling the world map, 50% when walking around off the world map, and 100% when in a battle scene or menu system. Please keep this in mind as FRAPS might be reporting 30fps at points, but the game could still be running at full speed. We will point out these differences again on the test pages.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
37 Comments
View All Comments
takuma683 - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
Responding the question of user Shinei:Yes, most Playstation games run at 30 effective fps, some at 15, 10 or even slower, and some do reach 60 (59.94 actually) fps. However, the "fps" displayed on ePSXe is "emulated" fps, that is, TV frames (vertical blanks) per second emulated. Games that run at 30 fps display a frame every two vertical interrupts.
Also a note to all: you don't need an external program to display real fps using ePSXe with Pete's plugins, just turn on the fix "Enable PC fps calculation" and it'll show you the actual fps.
Possessed Freak - Monday, March 8, 2004 - link
DerekWilson -'but this reference is a throwback to one of my favorite cartoon duos of all time ... '
But where are we going to find a duck and a rubber hose at this hour?
But rubber chafes me so.
---
Did I make the right educated guess?
Shinei - Sunday, March 7, 2004 - link
tsee: Aren't PSX games designed to run at 30fps, with the exception of a few later-generation games?tsee - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link
Even when I tried to limit FPS to 59.97 all the games run super fast. When I use the outdated VGS not as many games run but the ones that do run at normal speeds.BigFatCow - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link
we are adding PlayStaion emulationtypo.
BigFatCow - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link
PeteBernert - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
I want to add a small comment (since my plugins seems to be mentioned in the article ;)) about the "developed on/for ATI cards" confusions: all of my psx gpu plugins (Win D3D/OGL1/OGL2; Linux Mesa/XGL2) were in fact developed on nVidia cards. Starting 1999 on my good ole TNT1 card, later on GF1/GF3/GF4 ones. Yes, spring 2003 I got a R9700Pro (since the first GFFX cards didn't look to promising - hot and noisy - by then), but all major coding (and optimization) work was already finished at this point.So indeed only the pixel shader effects in the OGL2/XGL2 plugins were done with ATI hardware (using no special ATI extensions, though, only the standard ARB ones which are available on nVidia's DX9 cards as well).
Anyway, I am pretty sure that you also can find psx games which will run faster on nVidia cards (for example if many framebuffer reads are needed - even old nVidia cards are still two times faster with such reads than the newest ATI ones), so the spotlight on the two games mentioned in the article is just this: a spotlight. No need for grey hair ;)
ChronoReverse - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
Arguably, you could say that it's pretty boring for the majority of people out there that the A64 plays game X a few frames faster than a P4 (or vice versa).These are the people buying Dells and only caring whether or not the system can play the game.
In any case, I liked this article since I have a passing interest in emulation and emulation is a good way to test both the graphics and cpu subsystems.
DerekWilson - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
#25haha ... yeah, I could see how that would be funny ;-)
exciting from a technological perspective ... really freaking boring from any other perspective :-)
Cybercat - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
"Of course, getting 4 frames per second of something kind of close to what we see on the Game Cube is still pretty exciting."LOL :p Yeah I bet.