WinUAE speed changes!

[Damion]

 Hey SHADES,

SHADES wrote:
Hi all,

Just playing around with WinUAE and I have found that it runs 80% faster on my work HP Pentium 4 2.0Gig CELERON computer with onboard Intel crap graphics Windows XP and 512 MB RAM than it does on my ATHLON 2400+ computer with ATI 8500/128 graphics card and also 512MB RAM Windows 2000.

I would check your setup at home, because "all things being equal" your Athlon should be doing better. WinUAE smokes on my Athlon (Barton), 3.9 boots literally in 2.5 seconds, and benches roughly equivalent to a 1 GHz 68040 in processor benchmarks. I can't wait to try it on an Athlon 64.

Is your Athlon a mobile? What are the multiplier/FSB set to, and what is your RAM rated for? (Granted, your overall system config will have an effect..)

Is it the fact I am running windows 2000 on the Athlon? I wouldn't have thought so, or is it because some bright spark compiled WinUAE for Pentium 4 specificly?

I'd sure like to run the program faster than at work, but not at the cost of buying a Pentium 4 or having to buy a CRAP Intel graphics card. :pissed:

FWIW, WinUAE is *much* faster on XP than 98, haven't tried 2000. Don't bother with the graphics card, WinUAE 2D (especially RTG) is still slower than it could be, and I found absolutely no difference testing between a Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9800 XT on the same system. (Overall, 2D ops benched somewhat faster on my G3 Pegasos/Radeon 9000.) With a Radeon 8500, you'll get a much better performance boost by upgrading things other than your gfx card.

Also...I would highly suggest checking your chipset drivers, video drivers, and maybe giving XP a go...make sure you have a level testbed for comparison!! :-)

[Damion]

Those are definately good points...but personally I don't think this has anything to do with the processor,, I seriously doubt WinUAE uses SSE2, in fact a 1.8 GHz Barton "should" (setup properly) stomp a 2.0 GHz Celeron at WinUAE math/proc benchmarks.  

And it certainly could be a background task conflicting with things...myself I don't run "ANY" virus checker in the background, just update and scan with AntiVir about once a week or after I've been surfing prOn...YMMV

--edit--

Please excuse the small wrapping in some of my posts (can't seem to fix it for some reason)...my monitor tanked a few weeks back, and I'm presently stuck using a 12 year old 14" at 640x480...:-(

[Damion]

Cymric wrote:
@JetFireDX:

And for those who wanted to know all about this little hack, visit this link. Thanks for the heads up, I'll make good use of it!

From the link..

Note: This tweak is only useful for older processors with the cache located external to the CPU.

[Damion]

Looks spot on to me. You should be decimating the Celeron, especially in the "math" test which is what is
going to matter for WinUAE. I would suspect something in the program configuration (are you sure JIT is enabled??)...might also try again after installing XP. Overclocking would definately give you a nice
performance boost (especially upping the FSB a little) but it seems you have a software problem somewhere.

[Damion]

Where can I download the AIBB benchmarks you ran? I'd be willing to clock my Athlon identical to yours, then run the benchies as per your instruction...that should give us a rough idea of where you should be after installing XP.

[Damion]

Sorry m8ey, I meant where can I download the AIBB program, I'd never tried it until now. :-)

I found it, downloaded and played around with it a bit, and although the results were significantly faster
than the machines included with the program (obviously), they were also very erratic, differing wildly with each run. Some of the tests using RTG modes were also way off.

I've had better luck in the past with SysSpeed, AmigaMark and maybe P96Speed (for graphics).  
 
Here's to Thursday...only one more day to go this week
:pint: