Console Emulators: Our Newest Benchmark
by Derek Wilson on March 3, 2004 11:33 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Fantasy IX Performance - Frame Buffer Effects
Benchmark battle scene
Either fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your preferences), this is where most of the playing time in Final Fantasy games is spent. Welcome to the battle system. Here, we see offscreen drawing, framebuffer uploads and framebuffer effects in full swing. This portion of the game is also rendered at full framerate.
Here, we see the first really large difference of the day. The ATI cards jump to the top of the heap with a very significant lead in performance. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra barely squeaks by the full speed 60 fps limit. Of course, one of my favorite parts about playing this game on an emulator is that I can run at insane framerates and just push the X button a bunch to get through battle scenes faster. That trick actually works really well with all the effects and bells and whistles turned off, but that's neither here nor there.
What's here is the fact that the ATI Radeon based cards just handle the brute force of the battle scenes (which are some of the most complex to emulate in the PSX world) with much more ease than even the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.
CPU speed doesn't quite affect battle system performance as much as the GPU. It is good to see that Intel processors aren't still bottlenecked for this benchmark. The Prescott, Northwood and Newcastle processors all deliver about the same performance here, while the P4 EE and Athlon 64 3400+ lead the way.
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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.