What makes PCem much CPU intensive? I have extremely low emulation speed with PMMX 233 on my Win98SE test machine I've created, I tested NFS: High Stakes in it with a Voodoo2 (no SLI) and I get about only 9-10-11 FPS (as shown in the Machine Status window).
I am currently using PCem v15. I'm waiting for the new release soon.
My host is a Dell notebook with a Core 2 Duo CPU P7550 2.26/2.27 GHz, so what is the minimum host CPU requirements to run PMMX233/Win98/3DFX games? Just a curious question.
PCEM is an emulator that aims for accuracy so it requires a lot of CPU power, especially if you're emulating a 3DFX card because you really need at least four threads for that (one for the CPU emulation and three more for the 3DFX card),
That Core 2 Duo you're using is an ancient chip from 2009 that wasn't exactly fast even back then so you're going to get pretty bad slowdown if you try and emulate something as high end as a Pentium 233.
For reference I have an R5 3600X and a Pentium 233 with a Voodoo 2 is the fastest thing I can emulate without slowdown
DSN wrote: ↑Tue 03 Mar, 2020 8:52 am
Thanks. But what is better? Core i5 or Core i7/i9?
DSN wrote: ↑Tue 03 Mar, 2020 9:13 am
One more question: how many threads my Core2 Duo has? What is CPU threads? I don't know about this.
1) It entirely depends on the age of the CPU but you won't see much improvement going beyond a 6-core i5 that's unlocked and overclocked because PCEM doesn't use more than 4 cores/threads (the other two just just give the host PCs system processes something to use to keep things unclogged in my experience)
2)You're Core 2 Duo only has two cores and two threads, two incredibly slow and outdated cores at that. It used to be each core was a single thread but on many modern CPUs there's two threads per core to help it manage and organize it's workload more efficiently
You're right. I also have some slowdowns in my SiS 496/497/Overdrive-83 DOS 6.22/Win3.11 machine, where I play my DOS/Win16/Win32s games. At DOS idle (text mode) emulation speed is 95-96%. And at Win3.11 idle is about 91-96% speed, but when playing some games (like Civilization 2), the speed gets a little more slow (80-100% speed).
