I had been planning to replace my laptop with a new one but recently changed my mind and decided to build a tower. My target is $5-600, planning to not go overboard on things that are easy to upgrade later but make sure all the important parts are done right.
My primary concern in building this computer is that it be as optimized as possible for running mame, and I was asking around to try and get some input as I really don't know anything about computers. I'm mostly wondering if there are any particular things to avoid. The reason I started getting somewhat paranoid about it is because of my experience trying to get DOJ going on a friends computer. No matter what I did the thing absolutely refused to display the game in the correct aspect ratio, which was kind of a big deal.
Anyway, I got some general advice here and there but nothing definitive. I'm not necessarily asking for a complete build or a list of parts or anything like that, but just general input on what mame tends to like and dislike.
Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
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shmuppyLove
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Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Getting the best display doesn't have anything to do with the hardware it's running on. There are quite a few options in MAME for things like output resolution and aspect ratio, and there can be minor differences between systems if you're using a hardware renderer like Direct3D, but mainly it's down to the MAME options.
Aside from that, get the fastest CPU you can afford. The rest of the hardware really doesn't make any difference for MAME. For other higher-spec emulators (PCSX2, Dolphin, Demul), they do actually have hardware accelerated plugins available that will use the graphics card, so definitely a good mid- to high-end card will make a difference, as long as the CPU is beefy enough. I personally have an AMD Phenom X4 CPU overclocked to 3.0GHz and I get great performance, but I believe Intel has better clock-for-clock performance (albeit at a higher cost).
And I haven't tried it myself, but others have said that 64-bit versions of Windows have improved emulation performance. I'm not sure if it matters whether the emulator is specifically written for 64-bit or not.
Aside from that, get the fastest CPU you can afford. The rest of the hardware really doesn't make any difference for MAME. For other higher-spec emulators (PCSX2, Dolphin, Demul), they do actually have hardware accelerated plugins available that will use the graphics card, so definitely a good mid- to high-end card will make a difference, as long as the CPU is beefy enough. I personally have an AMD Phenom X4 CPU overclocked to 3.0GHz and I get great performance, but I believe Intel has better clock-for-clock performance (albeit at a higher cost).
And I haven't tried it myself, but others have said that 64-bit versions of Windows have improved emulation performance. I'm not sure if it matters whether the emulator is specifically written for 64-bit or not.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
For MAME you really don't need a lot. I would generally recommend a decent CPU (a good new Core i5) and a high end SSD (like the Samsung 830 which is quite cheap and extremely fast). You'll also want a decent GPU if you plan to watch movies or play 3D games. I've had only positive experience with AMD cards (HD7xxxx cards are especially good, best maker is Sapphire) as they offer the best video quality, but NVidia is perfectly fine too and even the integrated GPU in the newer i3/i5/i7 CPUs is good enough for anything but 3D games.
One thing that people often get wrong is the PSU, you don't need a super high 1000W+ beast. I've got an i5-2500k and two power hungry HD6950 graphics cards and am using a gold rated 600W PSU. Power consumption is always below 550W.
For the 32/64bit question: There is no reason to use Windows 7 32bit anymore imo. 64bit won't improve 32bit programs at all, but there's a small benefit for 64bit software.
One thing that people often get wrong is the PSU, you don't need a super high 1000W+ beast. I've got an i5-2500k and two power hungry HD6950 graphics cards and am using a gold rated 600W PSU. Power consumption is always below 550W.
For the 32/64bit question: There is no reason to use Windows 7 32bit anymore imo. 64bit won't improve 32bit programs at all, but there's a small benefit for 64bit software.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
1) a decent display; presume you already have, but if not invest in this over anything else.
2) yep, fastest clock speed processor you can get. Cheapest route will probably be amd but intel are typically better performers - it's just that often comes at a price.
If you're looking to overclock some of the asus motherboards do have almost automatic test/overclock apps built into the support software; others probably exist but worth looking into to make that easy and pretty safe.
3) Gpu totally depends on how you want to display the game - check out soft15 compatibility if on a crt otherwise ... whatever fits the budget, even the cheap ones offer decent performance in most games:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... ,3107.html
4) Noise; worth researching a little; but unless you're pc 3d gaming you probably won't be heating up anything too much.
5) ssd is perhaps one of the nicest boosts to any system, but when you're not streaming content it will unlikely be cost effective for your purpose/budget, unless you really like a quick boot and initial load.
2) yep, fastest clock speed processor you can get. Cheapest route will probably be amd but intel are typically better performers - it's just that often comes at a price.
If you're looking to overclock some of the asus motherboards do have almost automatic test/overclock apps built into the support software; others probably exist but worth looking into to make that easy and pretty safe.
3) Gpu totally depends on how you want to display the game - check out soft15 compatibility if on a crt otherwise ... whatever fits the budget, even the cheap ones offer decent performance in most games:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... ,3107.html
4) Noise; worth researching a little; but unless you're pc 3d gaming you probably won't be heating up anything too much.
5) ssd is perhaps one of the nicest boosts to any system, but when you're not streaming content it will unlikely be cost effective for your purpose/budget, unless you really like a quick boot and initial load.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
What kind of videocard requirements are suggested if you'd like to run hlsl on a 1600x1200 screen, or is that also cpu clock speed / system ram oriented
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Megahurtz myth.gray117 wrote:2) yep, fastest clock speed processor you can get. Cheapest route will probably be amd but intel are typically better performers - it's just that often comes at a price.
Intel beats AMD at the same clock speeds, oftentimes by quite a bit now.
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<S.Yagawa> I like the challenge of "doing the impossible" with older hardware, and pushing it as far as it can go.
<S.Yagawa> I like the challenge of "doing the impossible" with older hardware, and pushing it as far as it can go.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
IMHO, the most important thing for a MAME PC is that you get an ATI video card that is compatible with Soft-15khz, GroovyMAME, GroovyLinux, etc. A few Nvidia cards are supported, but last I heard there were still some lingering problems.
This gives you the option to drive a 15khz monitor... Which will allow you to display your games properly if you ever come across a good deal on an Arcade monitor.... or a PVM, or whatever.
This gives you the option to drive a 15khz monitor... Which will allow you to display your games properly if you ever come across a good deal on an Arcade monitor.... or a PVM, or whatever.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
I actually have a pretty decent PVM! Compatibility with that would be pretty cool, but as it stands I still don't really have a place for it in my room.
It's worth mentioning that I'm mostly worried about latency and accuracy in playing, I can deal with the game not looking 100% (not that I don't want that) for the sake of being able to play competitively and confidently. Realistically I'll probably do most of my playing on my primary HD monitor for the time being.
I had completely forgotten about SSDs, I'll definitely do a bit of browsing on that one. In my preliminary poking around with a friend I was looking at AMD processors and the MSI R6850 Cyclone...not sure about its compatibility with Soft-15khz (this is the first I've heard of it).
It's worth mentioning that I'm mostly worried about latency and accuracy in playing, I can deal with the game not looking 100% (not that I don't want that) for the sake of being able to play competitively and confidently. Realistically I'll probably do most of my playing on my primary HD monitor for the time being.
I had completely forgotten about SSDs, I'll definitely do a bit of browsing on that one. In my preliminary poking around with a friend I was looking at AMD processors and the MSI R6850 Cyclone...not sure about its compatibility with Soft-15khz (this is the first I've heard of it).
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Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Oh sure, but also never at the same pricetrap15 wrote:Megahurtz myth.gray117 wrote:2) yep, fastest clock speed processor you can get. Cheapest route will probably be amd but intel are typically better performers - it's just that often comes at a price.
Intel beats AMD at the same clock speeds, oftentimes by quite a bit now.
... it's always a bit of a fudge to compare the two and intel may be best performer in this case, but then it may also not strictly be necessary. Equally if you have to consider if/how you ever want to dedicate cores to certain tasks - especially if you imagine you want background tasks/recording running.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
I will say for Mame performance I regret having a lower clocked quad core instead of having a higher clock single or dual core processor which mame would benefit more from since it is unable to take much advantage of multiple core processors.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Generally speaking, you will find a very appreciable everyday boost from four cores versus two. MAME is important, but unless it is a purpose-built machine, it seems unwise to sacrifice the everyday applications that gain from extra cores. Six cores, on the other hand, is currently the specialist, niche platform. Additionally, Intel has put a good amount of work into their "Turbo" and other measures to focus more performance into a single core.
There is one thing I was meaning to dig up some benchmarks on - Core i7 (Sandy Bridge) 4-core versus 6-core designs in single-threaded (or primarily single-threaded) applications. Intel has been touting its ability to focus intensive tasks on one core, but if you have three or five cores faffing around with light background nonsense they might still be soaking up some memory bandwidth or cache that might be useful in single-threaded applications (so I suppose). A recent 3820 vs. 3930K review I read here made a point of stating something like that. They also find that some applications actually are tied pretty extensively to clock frequency, although this is a nearly apples-to-apples comparison - the LGA 1156 Core i7 2700K or 2600K compared to LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge CPUs, all of which have similar enough performance. I agree completely with the Trap15 that clock cycles aren't built equally. Additionally, the pricing reality is that to get a marginal speed boost through increased clock cycles, you pay a lot more and you may well suffer reduced longevity (important if you can afford a new computer twice a decade or less).
It seems like a reasonable time to purchase a computer, although Thunderbolt is just getting off the ground, SSDs are still finding their footing (IMO, they would make nice boot drives for me though), and USB3 is still working on finding applications (and it would also be nice to have more dedicated input lines, so various USB devices like mice are not getting bandwidth soaked up by other devices, or soaking up bandwidth for other devices, respectively). RAM prices were slated to increase moderately with one of the major suppliers folding, and regular hard drives are coming back to affordable levels (and there are some good new designs too - there is now a 3TB drive which uses 1 TB per platter, which results in a relatively stable, quiet, and power-thrifty device compared to other massive drives with four or more platters - I think the record is something like eleven, in a very old drive).
Looking at the Tom's Hardware CPU hierarchy chart a few days ago, I noticed that the Core 2 Duo E6600 is two or three rungs down the chart from the Core i7 920, but that CPU is merely on the second tier. E6600 is from 2006; Core i7 920 is from 2008. That seems strange, and I wonder if it's not just a result of Tom's reflecting the lack of CPU-bottlenecked games in their benchmark and ignoring "power users" (and things like MAME). If it were a rough ranking by actual performance, even allowing for 4 core versus 6 core application depth, I'd expect there to be a greater gap between 2012 offerings and 2008 than between 2008 and 2006. So beware when using those types of rankings as well.
There is one thing I was meaning to dig up some benchmarks on - Core i7 (Sandy Bridge) 4-core versus 6-core designs in single-threaded (or primarily single-threaded) applications. Intel has been touting its ability to focus intensive tasks on one core, but if you have three or five cores faffing around with light background nonsense they might still be soaking up some memory bandwidth or cache that might be useful in single-threaded applications (so I suppose). A recent 3820 vs. 3930K review I read here made a point of stating something like that. They also find that some applications actually are tied pretty extensively to clock frequency, although this is a nearly apples-to-apples comparison - the LGA 1156 Core i7 2700K or 2600K compared to LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge CPUs, all of which have similar enough performance. I agree completely with the Trap15 that clock cycles aren't built equally. Additionally, the pricing reality is that to get a marginal speed boost through increased clock cycles, you pay a lot more and you may well suffer reduced longevity (important if you can afford a new computer twice a decade or less).
It seems like a reasonable time to purchase a computer, although Thunderbolt is just getting off the ground, SSDs are still finding their footing (IMO, they would make nice boot drives for me though), and USB3 is still working on finding applications (and it would also be nice to have more dedicated input lines, so various USB devices like mice are not getting bandwidth soaked up by other devices, or soaking up bandwidth for other devices, respectively). RAM prices were slated to increase moderately with one of the major suppliers folding, and regular hard drives are coming back to affordable levels (and there are some good new designs too - there is now a 3TB drive which uses 1 TB per platter, which results in a relatively stable, quiet, and power-thrifty device compared to other massive drives with four or more platters - I think the record is something like eleven, in a very old drive).
Looking at the Tom's Hardware CPU hierarchy chart a few days ago, I noticed that the Core 2 Duo E6600 is two or three rungs down the chart from the Core i7 920, but that CPU is merely on the second tier. E6600 is from 2006; Core i7 920 is from 2008. That seems strange, and I wonder if it's not just a result of Tom's reflecting the lack of CPU-bottlenecked games in their benchmark and ignoring "power users" (and things like MAME). If it were a rough ranking by actual performance, even allowing for 4 core versus 6 core application depth, I'd expect there to be a greater gap between 2012 offerings and 2008 than between 2008 and 2006. So beware when using those types of rankings as well.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Assuming a purpose-built emulator box, in a perfect world, you'd buy a Core i3 and overclock the shit out of it. In this world, Intel marketing has decided that Core i3 chips are not for overclocking-the-shit-out-of.
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shmuppyLove
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Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
I wouldn't even go that far -- the Pentium G860 chips are < $100, 3.1GHz, and are fantastically capable for the price for gaming. Not quite as overclockable as the Core i3, but I'm sure you could push it close to 3.5 or 4GHz without much effort.Ex-Cyber wrote:Assuming a purpose-built emulator box, in a perfect world, you'd buy a Core i3 and overclock the shit out of it. In this world, Intel marketing has decided that Core i3 chips are not for overclocking-the-shit-out-of.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Welp, I may have got slightly carried away. Getting a free 6 month subscription to iRacing probably helped, I think I exceeded the needs of a basic mamebox by a bit.
I went with an i5 and got a nice Gigabyte motherboard half off as part of a microcenter deal. MSI Cyclone 6850, 8gb ram and a SSD boot drive. Friend at work is giving me a 500gb hdd which helped cut costs slightly as well, I'll pick up a 1.5tb or something down the line.
I've never had a real nice computer before, or even built one of my own, so I'm kind of excited about getting it all together. Hopefully I'll be happy with it.
I went with an i5 and got a nice Gigabyte motherboard half off as part of a microcenter deal. MSI Cyclone 6850, 8gb ram and a SSD boot drive. Friend at work is giving me a 500gb hdd which helped cut costs slightly as well, I'll pick up a 1.5tb or something down the line.
I've never had a real nice computer before, or even built one of my own, so I'm kind of excited about getting it all together. Hopefully I'll be happy with it.
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shmuppyLove
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Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Yes I think you will be very happy.
For me, there is really no substitute for a solid, fast PC. You will actually want to use it, and you won't have to sit and wait for it to boot or load software.
I've been running RAID 0 for many years now for this reason, and I'm looking at grabbing an SSD in the near future to take it one step further. I also need to upgrade my video card soon ... the 9800GT has been a true champion for several years now, but when things like the 7750 come out that are faster, cheaper, support newer technology and only need 65W ...
For me, there is really no substitute for a solid, fast PC. You will actually want to use it, and you won't have to sit and wait for it to boot or load software.
I've been running RAID 0 for many years now for this reason, and I'm looking at grabbing an SSD in the near future to take it one step further. I also need to upgrade my video card soon ... the 9800GT has been a true champion for several years now, but when things like the 7750 come out that are faster, cheaper, support newer technology and only need 65W ...
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
http://www.mameui.info/Bench.htm
The i7-2600K is actually beating the otherwise more capable i7-3930K here, and it's doing that with only 93W TDP instead of the 3930K's heavier 130W design. It has 4* 256K L2 caches whereas the 3930K has six of them, and the larger L3 caches are 8MB and 12MB respectively. The 3930K is pretty close, though, and is a bit better performing per-clock (not much, though: 201fps/4.8GHz = 41.875 for the 2600K; 43 and 1/3 for the 3930K). It's too bad they don't show any i5 scores because I think they would be very close to competitive. The only reason the i7 scores are showing up is probably because the computers listed at the MAMEUI site are used as primary workstations also; one set of data comes from a machine R. Belmont uses for compiling, I believe.
In terms of price and performance, i5 is undoubtedly the way to go. I wouldn't feel bad switching my i7 920 for one, even if the CPU socket has a few less pins. Many people think (and the tests seem to support it) that Sandy Bridge-E CPUs (like the 3820) are a "fairly niche" product, but in truth so probably is the regular LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge. There aren't enough benchmarks to tell, but it looks like PCI-E lanes and memory bandwidth aren't driving MAME performance (not a surprising result).
The i7-2600K is actually beating the otherwise more capable i7-3930K here, and it's doing that with only 93W TDP instead of the 3930K's heavier 130W design. It has 4* 256K L2 caches whereas the 3930K has six of them, and the larger L3 caches are 8MB and 12MB respectively. The 3930K is pretty close, though, and is a bit better performing per-clock (not much, though: 201fps/4.8GHz = 41.875 for the 2600K; 43 and 1/3 for the 3930K). It's too bad they don't show any i5 scores because I think they would be very close to competitive. The only reason the i7 scores are showing up is probably because the computers listed at the MAMEUI site are used as primary workstations also; one set of data comes from a machine R. Belmont uses for compiling, I believe.
In terms of price and performance, i5 is undoubtedly the way to go. I wouldn't feel bad switching my i7 920 for one, even if the CPU socket has a few less pins. Many people think (and the tests seem to support it) that Sandy Bridge-E CPUs (like the 3820) are a "fairly niche" product, but in truth so probably is the regular LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge. There aren't enough benchmarks to tell, but it looks like PCI-E lanes and memory bandwidth aren't driving MAME performance (not a surprising result).
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
I don't think it's really fair to compare 2600K and 3930K specified TDPs in the context of this benchmark. The 3930K is probably running at a lower percentage of its full power dissipation than the 2600K is (since 3930K has 2 more cores that are almost certainly not being loaded by MAME), they're both overclocked, and the 2600K is clocked higher (which means there's a good chance it's running at a higher voltage).
But yes, the larger point is valid: there's not much point in buying an SB-E unless you're doing workstationy stuff like gigantic MATLAB simulations or recompiling the entire JDK or whatever.
Oddly, there's an argument to be made that the Xeon E3-1200 series is now the midrange price/power/performance sweet spot of Intel's offerings. Compare Xeon E3-1240 V2 to Core i7-3770, for example. Their market segmentation has put them in a pretty strange place.
But yes, the larger point is valid: there's not much point in buying an SB-E unless you're doing workstationy stuff like gigantic MATLAB simulations or recompiling the entire JDK or whatever.
Oddly, there's an argument to be made that the Xeon E3-1200 series is now the midrange price/power/performance sweet spot of Intel's offerings. Compare Xeon E3-1240 V2 to Core i7-3770, for example. Their market segmentation has put them in a pretty strange place.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Hmm, that's quite true.
130/6 = 21 and 2/3
95/4 = 23.75
A bit of a bonus to the smaller offering. One other thing that supposedly plays into this is Intel's claimed dynamic over- and underclocking of individual cores to speed up one while the others idle (Turbo Boost 2.0). I would expect that works better per core for four cores than for six, but in any case you're right, the 130W TDP is just a design number and it won't hit that number often, especially if you have some power saving features in your motherboard or system the 130W system should perform very similarly to the 95W system but with two extra cores available on request.
I hadn't even looked at the Xeon offerings...80W for the e3-1200 series is nice, although $100 for 200MHz more, reaching 3.4 GHz in the 1270 model, is kind of lol (the 1230 model is $239; 1270 is $339). Especially when you consider that there are 22nm node "V2" versions of most of the CPUs at only 69W (!) and very comparable or even cheaper prices (the 1230 V2 is actually $236, a few dollars less than the 32nm version).
130/6 = 21 and 2/3
95/4 = 23.75
A bit of a bonus to the smaller offering. One other thing that supposedly plays into this is Intel's claimed dynamic over- and underclocking of individual cores to speed up one while the others idle (Turbo Boost 2.0). I would expect that works better per core for four cores than for six, but in any case you're right, the 130W TDP is just a design number and it won't hit that number often, especially if you have some power saving features in your motherboard or system the 130W system should perform very similarly to the 95W system but with two extra cores available on request.
I hadn't even looked at the Xeon offerings...80W for the e3-1200 series is nice, although $100 for 200MHz more, reaching 3.4 GHz in the 1270 model, is kind of lol (the 1230 model is $239; 1270 is $339). Especially when you consider that there are 22nm node "V2" versions of most of the CPUs at only 69W (!) and very comparable or even cheaper prices (the 1230 V2 is actually $236, a few dollars less than the 32nm version).
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Yeah; the big snag is apparently motherboard/BIOS compatibility. Just because a board will run a given Core-i5/i7 doesn't mean it'll run the equivalent E3-1200/V2, and you probably don't want to use a C202/C204 server board for this kind of build.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
Assuming you get a board with an up to date BIOS, these (and probably cheaper boards or those from other manufacturers) will work:
ASRock Z77 Extreme6 - BIOS rev. P1.20 or higher (Extreme4 will also work, with a recent BIOS)
ASRock Z77 Professional LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard, BIOS rev. P1.10 or higher - $240
ASRock Z77 Extreme6 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard $180
Of course the usual caveats about the BIOS lottery apply, as do those about hoping to flash BIOSes without having a CPU compatible with the installed BIOS. I haven't run into that problem myself.
Random tech note: The only 22nm Xeons Intel is currently offering (at least according to Newegg) are all quad-cores. There are some 6 and even 8 core CPUs in the channel, but they are 32nm.
ASRock Z77 Extreme6 - BIOS rev. P1.20 or higher (Extreme4 will also work, with a recent BIOS)
ASRock Z77 Professional LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard, BIOS rev. P1.10 or higher - $240
ASRock Z77 Extreme6 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard $180
Of course the usual caveats about the BIOS lottery apply, as do those about hoping to flash BIOSes without having a CPU compatible with the installed BIOS. I haven't run into that problem myself.
Random tech note: The only 22nm Xeons Intel is currently offering (at least according to Newegg) are all quad-cores. There are some 6 and even 8 core CPUs in the channel, but they are 32nm.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
do research a bit about input lags, display lags, whatnot.
these lags takes a lot of fun from mame for me nowadays.
shmupmame provides hell load better performance compared to normal mame. use that as your main mame exe. gamewise, shmupmame reduces the input lag from frame to frame in mame itself, but from your own input (keyboard, usb pad), try to go to the smallest lag route possible. (i do heard about usb joypads causes some input lag)
i could be wrong though. trap15 can provide better input here.
these lags takes a lot of fun from mame for me nowadays.
shmupmame provides hell load better performance compared to normal mame. use that as your main mame exe. gamewise, shmupmame reduces the input lag from frame to frame in mame itself, but from your own input (keyboard, usb pad), try to go to the smallest lag route possible. (i do heard about usb joypads causes some input lag)
i could be wrong though. trap15 can provide better input here.
It is to us a sufficient body in which, fairies and it is packed and can group of play.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
This thread is more about the hardware side of things. The MAME software side of things is covered in other threads, and is pretty well known around here. There are still a lot of things you could do on the hardware side that should (at least in theory) reduce lag, especially monitor selection. Possibly OS choice could help too, as well as buying the barest minimum of components.
Re: Building a PC, primary concern is mame optimization.
joeboto wrote:do research a bit about input lags, display lags, whatnot.
these lags takes a lot of fun from mame for me nowadays.
shmupmame provides hell load better performance compared to normal mame. use that as your main mame exe. gamewise, shmupmame reduces the input lag from frame to frame in mame itself, but from your own input (keyboard, usb pad), try to go to the smallest lag route possible. (i do heard about usb joypads causes some input lag)
i could be wrong though. trap15 can provide better input here.
This is a post in the other mame thread regarding input lag and GroovyMAME......
Calamity wrote:Hi,
I'm the person who's currently in charge of GroovyMAME. I have been reading about the input lag related topics in this forum since log, though I have never posted before.
I find input lag to be a highly elusive issue, probably the users of this forum are the best to judge this stuff.
GroovyMAME *generates* the right display timings automatically provided you use an ATI card. But enabling the proper timings is just half of the problem. The v-sync implementation and the throttling mechanism in MAME need to be slightly modified in order to ensure absolutely smooth scrolling and sound synchronization.Ed Oscuro wrote: GroovyMAME is optimized for output to arcade monitors, yes? Is it merely selecting the right display timing for the monitor?
On the other hand, we have the input lag issue. Since long I have read that any sort of v-sync causes input lag to some extent. Because of this, it is widely recommended to disable v-sync or triplebuffering as a way to reduce input lag. However, once you get used to properly v-synced video, you simply can't go back and live with the artifacts, it just kills the illusion of emulation altogether.
So I tried to understand why v-sync shoud introduce input lag at all. And specially, why should it add more lag than using -throttle alone ???. After all, they're basically just two different implementations of a wait loop to keep the frame rate in place. Most articles I've read assume the modern 3D-game scenario, where frame rates are not constant. In emulation, the frame rate is a known value.
To keep short, I found what could be the possible cause of input lag related to v-sync in MAME. Basically, MAME is locked to input messages from the OS for the period of time which takes a new frame to be drawn to the screen. This is because the draw operation is called from the message loop where the input messages are supposed to be processed too. Obviously, if v-sync is enabled, the draw operation won't return until the vblank happens, consuming most of the time in the frame and keeping the message loop locked.
The multithreading implementation in MAME makes things even worse as it can actually keep the emulation thread unaware of input data during several frames, if the video card's refresh is lower than the game's refresh.
What I made for GroovyMAME is to create a third thread of execution to deal with video updates (draw + wait for v-sync), so the window thread is always free to process input messages as soon as they come. This *seems* to keep input lag as low as what you get with -throttle alone.
Of course you can't expect a reduction of the inherent frames of lag due to sprite buffering and stuff, but at least it seems to improve things on the specific lag caused by v-sync.
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noiseredux
- Posts: 67
- Joined: Wed May 25, 2011 9:46 pm