noob question - pcem process not being more than 10% in task manager when struggling to emulate even a 150mhz pentium

[salvakpo]

why does the process is so low in CPU usage in windows host task manager when in fact is doing it's best to emulate?

[Federico]

Because task manager shows overall cpu's usage and PCem is single core, so you may have even a 5% cpu usage with a 16 core ryzen and still find situations in wich guest CPU wont be emulated at 100%. You can provide some details of your host machine and what you are trying to play/do on PCem to see exactly why.

[harrison98]

In Windows 11 (at least), in task manager, select the "Performance" tab, then right click on the CPU graph and select "Change graph to -> Logical processors." This will let you see the CPU usage for each CPU thread.

All emulation in PCem is done on one host CPU thread (aside from Voodoo emulation).

A more useful metric to look at, though, is the "CPU time" listed in PCem (Misc -> Machine and then Options -> Status). That will show how much of the available CPU thread PCem is utilizing (100% means PCem is using 100% of the available CPU power and can't go any higher).

[salvakpo]

Because task manager shows overall cpu's usage and PCem is single core, so you may have even a 5% cpu usage with a 16 core ryzen and still find situations in wich guest CPU wont be emulated at 100%. You can provide some details of your host machine and what you are trying to play/do on PCem to see exactly why.

ryzen 2600. 6 cores, 12 threads. it wont go any higher than a 150 mhz pentium without sound stuttering in windows 95.

offtopic but its crazy how well the emulator resembles its machine emulated. i remember almost the exact same speed games ran on my 166mhz pentium when i was little, tried the 233 mmx one, thats a huge boost from the 150mhz and ran exaclty as my friends PCs.

[tk421]

PCem typically needs an all-core turbo 4.0 Ghz+ CPU to run Pentium tasks with reasonable performance. If you run PCem on a system that fast with a single-core turbo speed of 4.5 Ghz+ then you should get much better performance.

My 9750h-based laptop can run PCem with the emulated Pentium II 300 and Voodoo 3 with good performance, if not perfect performance depending on which program or game I am running.

On my machine, the P2 450 + Voodoo 3 is limited to just a few games with ~100% performance only during actual gameplay. In-game menus and Windows performance slows down too much.

Pentium-MMX performance offers the best balance between value for money and variety of games that can be played on PCem. Newer CPUs emulated in PCem just don't have that kind of flexibility unless you have a very powerful PC.

It seems to me that your PC will emulate a Pentium 90 to roughly a Pentium 120. The Pentium 133 might work. You would most likely need to rely on a Voodoo 2 + a standard 2D accelerated video card of your choice. If I remember correctly the Voodoo 3 required a Pentium 133 while the Voodoo 2 could run on a Pentium 90.

I noticed that the Voodoo 3 is not always a good choice for some of the older Win95/98 games, so older video cards offer good flexibility here. I distinctly remember my real Voodoo 3 years ago failing to run some older games that ran perfectly on my older Pentium-MMX PC. It had no Voodoo card at all.

Most PCem users have historically referred new users to Intel PCs even after the introduction and evolution of the Ryzen. If the Ryzen 2600 runs at 3.9 Ghz all-core turbo speed, then a Pentium 133 might be the best place to start. In all likelihood you will need to lower the emulated CPU to 120 Mhz or less.

The emulated Socket 7 430vx motherboards offer a great range of emulated CPUs, from the Pentium 75 right through to the K6-2 300. Performance is reliable too.

To maximize the performance of the emulated CPU and video card, I recommend limiting emulated system RAM to 32-64mb. The size of your emulated hard drive should be limited as well, with 2gb being a great place to start. Your PC's CPU has to carry the whole PCem load, so the less demand you place on your CPU the better the results. I recommend restarting your system before loading PCem and limit multi-tasking to just PCem and other programs you need to run at the same time.

I hope this helps,

tk421

[harrison98]

You would most likely need to rely on a Voodoo 2 + a standard 2D accelerated video card of your choice. If I remember correctly the Voodoo 3 required a Pentium 133 while the Voodoo 2 could run on a Pentium 90.

Voodoo 3 can run fine on anything with PCI, including a Pentium 90. I highly recommend using a Voodoo 3 over a Voodoo 2, since you can fix the LOD bias problem that PCem has via the Voodoo 3's 3dfx tools. I haven't seen any host CPU performance differences between a Voodoo 3 and a Voodoo 2 (they're both basically bottlenecked by anything under a P2-400 and get the same performance). But yeah, there are some games that won't behave well on a Voodoo 3, so be aware of that.

To maximize the performance of the emulated CPU and video card, I recommend limiting emulated system RAM to 32-64mb.

Be careful setting RAM too low - you definitely don't want the guest system to run out of RAM and have to use a Windows swap file. As far as I know, there's no cost in PCem to increasing RAM.

[Federico]

ryzen 2600. 6 cores, 12 threads. it wont go any higher than a 150 mhz pentium without sound stuttering in windows 95.

offtopic but its crazy how well the emulator resembles its machine emulated. i remember almost the exact same speed games ran on my 166mhz pentium when i was little, tried the 233 mmx one, thats a huge boost from the 150mhz and ran exaclty as my friends PCs.

Well that ryzen is quite old and will struggle to get stable 100% CPU emulation on high-end Pentiums, although you should be able to get 100% performance most of the time with something like a PMMX 233. I have an 8086k running stock, this is a similar performing CPU, just slightly better on single threaded tasks, and it manages to emulate a PMMX 300 on W95 at 100% with just casual drops.

You can try the following:

Using a specific era socket 7 motherboard instead a supersocket 7 (I get much better performance emulating the pentium with an Asus PI-P55T2P4 than a FIC-VA 503)

Once you finished with setup and installed all drivers, check the refresh rate of your video adapter properties on W95. In my case the P300 with a banshee by default is setted to 75hz, change it to 60hz or to adapter defaults, this has a huge impact on performance.

In anycase remember that on specific situations the performance will temporarily drop to 70-60% even with high-end hosts, depending on the task, or the game played. This is normal.

[salvakpo]

ok, so, my cpu was not a 2600, its actually a 3600. my clock speed stood at 3.95 no matter what, so i OCd it to 4.2 (the max clock amd says it runs) just by putting a multiplier of 42 in the bios and it works nice with 1024x768 running the goodtimes.avi file in fullscreen (my benchmark) with a pentium 200 mmx with an s3virge dx (not interested in filtering nor hardware 3d acceleration). pentium 233 mmx (my desired CPU) runs the benchmark with just a couple stuttering and the games runs fine. If i leave 800x600 with the 233, everything seems to be alright

[salvakpo]

whats the 2d acceleration only with no filtering whatsoever video card thats the cheapest in host CPU?

[harrison98]

whats the 2d acceleration only with no filtering whatsoever video card thats the cheapest in host CPU?

I don't know that anyone's ever measured it carefully. My suspicion is that it doesn't matter too much.

Keep in mind that you can't really benchmark PCem like you can a traditional setup. Each piece of software will put a different load on the emulator, depending on how efficiently the dynamic recompiler is able to be utilized.