PCem

Take a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-w0YWt6sE

Quake and SS2 are not lagging or suffering from low fps, the run like in slow-motion, why?

My currnet rig:

i seen the video, and they are running well, there is nothing wrong with it. quake on your setup hovers around 60-70% thats where slowdown come from, ss2 runs in about 50% and if you are not running but walking ,that is the speed. you run quake in pcem on 1024? are you mad? if it could help go down as low as you can with resolution , especially with ss2. and go on low detail. PCem must work at 100% not 50% cos thats where slowdown came from, some games use less CPU power and some are taking much more, so your PCem at 200mmx might run at 100% running quake 2 at 800X600 but ss2 need more power and as you can see your rig cant handle that very well, the recording app. probably took some power to. use 166mmx and se the results but as long as PCem will run 50% it wil work at 50% speed. run 300mmx and probably it will run at 30% , and 30% of speed will be achieved. Run 3dmark 99 or 2000 and look how many seconds on test count one sec. while your PCem runs at 30 or 50 %. Like i said , there is nothing wrong with PCem and the issue here is that you trying to push it too far. remember, you wanna to run PCem effectively make sure you are not running apps in the background , or if you do ,then assign three non used threads to PCem, like 6,7, and 8th or so, PCem with voodoo will use only three threads.

Yes, now I understood. Tried different CPU and my quake 3 started working like charm. Though ss2 is still working slowly

But, PCEM doesn't utilise GPU at all?

no it does not utilize GPU, cos it emulates an virtual GPU from voodoo 1/2 and The whole job is performing by Your host CPU, so if you have Gforce 20.0000 fffxx or intel hd2500 it works the same. it really can not use GPU to emulate anything , cos it needs to run a program, emulating eg. Voodoo chipset. GPU can not run a program.
PCem is by far the best emulator ever written.

"@2.6ghz" says it all.

You'll want at least 4.5ghz if you expect any speed from emulating a PMMX266 currently.

Leilei his cpu run at 3.5 turbo, and i am more than sure , that when it runs PCem it runs at full speed, but you right about 4.5ghz.

Vorob, ss2 is a quite CPU intensive game for its age.

szadycbr wrote:Leilei his cpu run at 3.5 turbo, and i am more than sure , that when it runs PCem it runs at full speed, but you right about 4.5ghz.

Vorob, ss2 is a quite CPU intensive game for its age.

Not everything is ghz... Single thread performance is what you have to look at too!
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.ph ... 5B%5D=2275
Take a look there, I have the 4790k at 4.5 ghz and I can barely emulate the Pentium MMX 233
The 6700HQ even if for some reason could reach the 4.5 ghz like the 4790k, it would perform slower because the single thread rating for the 6700HQ is 1800 and the same index for the 4790k is 2500

Omarsis81, you right i forgot, it can do that only on single thread. my poor i52410m is 2.3 and turbo 2.9 when i run PCem on 3 threads it runs at 2.7. Your cpu goes up to 4.3ghz running on 3 threads according to specs, his cpu goes to 3.3ghz on 3 threads (cores if you like).
Omarsis run cpuZ or similar thing and take a look exactely how does your cpu performing i did on mine, and open task manager of course , and look how many threads are working.

Okay, i see.

To be clear, my 6700hq can do 3100 for 4 cores, 3200 for 3, 3300 for 2 and 3500 for 1

to Omarsis81 , i cant PM you the picture so i put it here.
CPU Coaligation/affinity set to 3 on cpu 0,1,2 excluding 4th thread. task manager perf. up to 75% , -25% from not using one core/thread.

Interesting thing that one of setting affinity exluding one thread, but... I found out that PCem uses random thread to set for the CPU emulation. Sometimes the fullest thread is the 0, sometimes the 1, and so on.... I'll up the screen in about 8 hours from here that I reach home

i excluded one thread only cos i have 4 and only 3 are used, you can check it on any fps test switching off thread by thread and you will see. You got 8 and still only 3 are used but fortunate for you, you can run some apps in backround and assign unused threads to PCem, i dont have much possibilities with 4 threads.

I disabled HyperThreading... I found that PCem works better that way, and it makes sense to me because if CPU or Voodoo emulation falls into a "false" core (ie. a HT one) it won't work at its fullest potential. I hope I made myself clear haha

thanks omarsis81, i tryed without HT and its much better, altough i have ony 2 threads then and voodoo2 isnt performing as fast , what i can clearly notice on nfsIII menu and its "flying" description of cars brands. however ill use from now on only 2 threads without HT cos CPU works better, and there is no use for voodoo if you dont have good CPU. Thanks.

Hope this helps szadycbr!

SS2 slowing down PCem than another game doesn't mean it's a more stronger cpu using game. I do remember it being very unfriendly to the K6 line however (which translated x86 to RISC, etc)

Often the smoothest games you can run are id tech-based (Quake/Quake2) as PCem's recompiler handles them really really well. I can PMMX300 100% no issue often with them in the software renderer, which would be the biggest way those games can hog the CPU

Also my Pentium II 300MHz (Deschutes core) can only attain speeds equal to PCem's PMMX166 right now so maybe either PCem's emulating too fast OR my P2 is unusually slow and I forgot the performance it should have had

Leelei, ss2 really has poor engine and is badly optimized. it consuming the real cpu power. in the old days when everyone had pII/III i had 233mmx, overclocked to 266 and ss2 was still showing how demanding it is.

Omarsis81!!! you see? 3 threads and you running at 4.5ghz, nice cpu. When you run on 4 threads , any benchmark, turn off one and leave 3 during benchmark and you see no difference at all, only 3 are used.

SS2 causes a lot of code regeneration in PCem. I'm not 100% sure if it's self-modifying code or just cache thrashing, but it's less than ideal in any case.

As far as 3DFX stuff goes, SS2 is about the worst case in PCem (Turok is also bad), Quake engine games are about the best case, most other games are somewhere in between.

I'm also getting some hitch ups when sound plays. Is sound emulation also intensive? What's the lightest type of soundcard? Sound Blaster 16?

Take a look, Thief Dark Project:

https://youtu.be/Xw163cJ_OCk

Game is almost 100% but when these hitch ups happen it drops. Then i open menu which should run perfect, but its only 33% there and horrible sound. What's the problem?

i run the demo using p120mmx and game was mostly 90-95% on my 2.7ghz when i open menu it drops to 30-40%, then i run it on p75 and it runs well, 100% , although no as nice , but fine, then i open menu and bahh, it goes to 40% , you are right , something isnt right, either with PCem or game engine, cos i never seen that much slowdown on p75.
Vorob , the sound will always be wrong if it is not around 100%.

A Pentium 75 would be very below the minimum specs to run Thief, a Pentium 200 is the recommended hardware
http://gamesystemrequirements.com/game/ ... thief-gold
http://forums.vgrequirements.info/showthread.php?t=3092

Omarsis81, thats not a problem, that is not the reason i does slow down so much, it might not achieve the desired speed or smothness but emulated CPU must work on 100% if host is strong enough. if game requires more, then it wont work as it should but still, CPU can not slow down as much, vorob runs 133mmx at 3.2 ghz if he will run p75 he will have similar results, so you want to say that 3.2ghz is not enough to fully emulate p75?
Vorob, just run it on p75 and tell us whats the slowdown or better , You run p75 on 4.5 ghz and you will see something isnt right. At least this time Sarah should agree with me, that p75 cant go down to 50% at 3.2 ghz and thats what probably will happend.

i've made myself p30 to see how it would perform, and quake III took ages to load and get about 2fps, nice slide show but always 100%. can 2.7ghz fully emulate 30mhz? i think it can, thief boot bit faster , game achieved about 5fps, so better than q3 and always 100% until menu and drop to 70%, dont know where the slowdown come from, but you can run any benchmark, etc. performance will never drop from 100% at this low emulated speed.

Hahaha, that 0.5 multiplier made my day! PCem shouldn't let you run with that configuration! Totaly impossible in real world
I will install Thief this weekend and see how it goes with my PC

leilei wrote: Also my Pentium II 300MHz (Deschutes core) can only attain speeds equal to PCem's PMMX166 right now so maybe either PCem's emulating too fast OR my P2 is unusually slow and I forgot the performance it should have had

How do you measure your Pentium II performance? Game's FPS or any benchmark? SiSoft Sandra is a very good one!
Also, what chipset do you have?
Remember that those cheap PC Chips motherboard had appalling performance

szadycbr: I was playing Thief with an emulated Pentium MMX 233 and the game goes smooth as silk, always at 100% and 50 fps average at 640x480 on a Voodoo2.
I wanted to record a video with FRAPS, but it only captures the gaming screen as if I was in full screen and doesn't show the PCem's CPU percentage

check the slowdown on the menu. and do screenshot with printscreen key. thats normal that is smooth on p233mmx if it runs on p75.

I didn't understand the last part of your sentence, but here's the screenshot.

wrong, you must give screenshot from menu screen during gameplay, you show screenshot from menu before playing game, and that is working fine everywhere , also on mine. Like i said run the game and then go to menu, game must work in background cos only then slowdown come. If p75 can handle game in playable way and p166 mmx voodoo2 runs it fairly smooth then its obvious than on p233 it will be smooth as silk, what's not to understand?