Console Emulators: Our Newest Benchmark
by Derek Wilson on March 3, 2004 11:33 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Fantasy IX Performance - The World Map
The location benched on the World Map.
This is a full 3D landscape environment with some framebuffer effects (in this case, rain). The FRAPS reported frame rate is about 33% of the emulator reported framerate.
In this benchmark, GPU seems to have less impact than CPU (as seen in the next graph), but the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra has finally crept out from under the pile. Of course, that doesn't mean as much considering the fact that the performance delta from top to bottom is only 3 frames per second.
Here, we see both the AMD Athlon 64 processors leading the Intel bunch. With all the Intel processors essentially pushing 66 frames per second (almost 200fps in the emulator), this seems like it could be a platform limitation. The added speed and cache of the 3.4GHz EE not adding any benefit at all indicates that there is a bottleneck somewhere else in the system. All we can do right now is to give a sidelong glance at the motherboard and wonder, but we don't have any conclusive evidence of what is going on here yet.
Final Fantasy IX Performance - Exploring Locations
Final Fantasy IX Performance - Frame Buffer Effects
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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 When I use the outdated VGS not as many games run but the ones that do run at normal speeds.BigFatCow - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link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.