Writing down about performance in PCem

[Zacker]

I was installing Win95OSR2 on PCem earlier today and I am writing the performance percentage.
HOST MACHINE: Core i5 4210-U 1.7ghz with turbo boost up to 2.7ghz, Nvidia GeForce 840, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, Win10
PCem MACHINE: Pentium 75, Award 430VX, S3 VirgeDX, 128MB RAM, 'A lot' of cache, Mid VLB/PCI, AWE32, and Voodoo. All settings on the video and Voodoo configure are at max, 4GB HDD
PCem rev: Not sure. It's the one with only 1 executable. I can't actually compile my own stuff(someone pls halp me...)
BOOTUP:56-95%, memory test made it up to 96%, drive detection slowed it down to 56%
BOOTDISK: 60%-95%
FORMAT: 41%
COPY FILES FROM DISK(copy e:\win95\*.* c:\windows\options\cabs\*.*): A whooping 20% at the lowest, and 59 at best.
SETUP:(NOTE: Switches used are: /p j /nm /is)Lowest went 25%, mostly 75%, hit 100% for ~2 mins(it was AWESOME to see the loading bar hit 75% when the percentage was at 75%)
I will continue the installation process now, but I might not update today as I have school tmr...

[omarsis81]

the Voodoo emulation requieres a horsepower CPU to work at 100% levels constantly
I have a 4790k and I feel it's the minimum for the Voodoo emulation to work as it should be

[Orchidsworn]

I am running some glide games at full speed just fine with voodoo emulation on a Phenom II system. What chokes my system is the higher clocked Pentiums. But sub 200 MHZ I seem ok and around 90 mhz I can run anything Voodoo that is emulated well at this point full out. Well full out if it could originally run on a 90mhz Pentium.

[startmenu]

A PGO build would improve the performance.
Build PCem with cflag "-fprofile-generate". Then run your desired/often-used programs on the emulator testing build. The testing build will create .gcda files in the src directory. Keep .gcda files and remove .o .res .exe files. Rebuild PCem with cflag "-fprofile-use" and you'll get an optimized PCem build.

I tested edit.com under DOS 6.22. it runs at 20% or so on the normal build and at 50% to 60% on PGO build.

Reference:

-fprofile-generate will instrument the application with profiling code. The application will, while actually running, log certain events that could improve performance if this usage pattern was known at compile time. Branches, possibility for inlining, etc, can all be logged, but I'm not sure in detail how GCC implements this.

After the program exits, it will dump all this data into *.gcda files, which are essentially log data for a test run. After rebuilding the application with -fprofile-use flag, GCC will take the *.gcda log data into account when doing its optimizations, usually increasing the performance significantly. Of course, this depends on many factors.

from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4365 ... tions-in-g

[leilei]

I'd say Phenom II 3GHz is a good min for 3dfx emulations assuming P133 A Lot cache. It's enough for skirting along Turok on 512x384 with the filter disabled. Having two threads for it is also a big help, and there's still more room for speedups (like using SSE2 to handle the texture mapping)

random remark on optimization: had good performance luck with -O3 -flto for quick compiles.

[Zacker]

I'd say Phenom II 3GHz is a good min for 3dfx emulations assuming P133 A Lot cache. It's enough for skirting along Turok on 512x384 with the filter disabled. Having two threads for it is also a big help, and there's still more room for speedups (like using SSE2 to handle the texture mapping)

random remark on optimization: had good performance luck with -O3 -flto for quick compiles.

I really doubt a Phenom II 3GHz can emulate Voodoo and a P133. I'm having troubles emulating Quake 1 or Half-Life on my i3 2100 desktop. Haven't had the chance to try out anything else. My i3 2100 has hyper-threading and doesn't go past 80% in Quake 1 with a P75, a lot of cache, and Voodoo.

And I never expected anyone to reply to this thread, but ok...

[leilei]

Quake's nothing. You can burn through in p166 a lot cache on a Phenom II on that with a pgo build, runs 100% and performs roughly similar to Pentium laptops of the era


Eradicator though......... recent Core i5's struggle with that on P75 Infinite lol

[Zacker]

Quake's nothing. You can burn through in p166 a lot cache on a Phenom II on that with a pgo build, runs 100% and performs roughly similar to Pentium laptops of the era


Eradicator though......... recent Core i5's struggle with that on P75 Infinite lol

I don't have access to different builds. I don't know shit about compiling my own builds, the compiler tool dosen't work for me, the latest build I can have is the release V10.1, I only had access to pre-V10 releases cuz someone on this forum had it on his own git and it came with executable compiled for me.

Quake and HL1 is the only games that use Voodoo that I have access to. I own HL1 on my steam account(therefore I think it's OK to pirate earlier versions), and my dad has a Quake 1 CD. I would love to get other games that can use the Voodoo to test out, but until I save up enough money to get Tomb Raider or smth on GOG, I'm tied to these two games.

My i3 desktop does NOT like the V10.1 release. It never crashed, but for some reason I get less percentage points than my laptop. It's an i3 2100, and according to CPUboss, it can beat a Phenom II in most situations.