Video Card's affect on speed

[chrismckpk]

ATM im using an ATI Radeon 7200 and I was planning on upgrading it to a radeon 9800 pro and I was curious if this would bring a noticale increase in speed. Many games I've been playing such as goldeneye and perfect dark have become stuttery and had slow frame rates. Was wondering how much affect on this the video card upgrade would have. I'm using an AMD athlon 1200 ghz with 512MB of ram.

 

[nephalim]

I have a PIII 900mhz with 512MB of RAM. With my Ati Mobility M4 (Rage 128,) I got anywhere from 1/4 speed to full speed. Now I have a Radeon M9, and I can run everything i've played at full speed, with the GFX settings at the highest for quality (the most noticable difference especially was windowed worked a hell of a lot better, it also was full speed.) So YES, it makes a BIG difference. A CPU of 1.0mhz (P3) is good enough to run any N64 game full speed AFAIK provided the graphics card is right.

 

[Doomulation]

Hold it right there - pj focuses on the processor, not the gfx card. Of course, if you got a crappy one such as a built-in intel, then you're likely going to get speed bost from a new card. So you're not going to get much. The best would be to upgrade your cpu.

 

[Smiff]

erm the truth is somewhere between those two replies.

what people forget is that PJ is automatically trying to validate blend modes in v1.5, so when a card can't do something the video plugin has extra math to do then in substitutions, this can significantly increase system requirement i.e. slow the game. how much depends on the game and system but something like a 30% overall difference from the difference in CPU used by the plugin just from not having to validate in some games wouldn't surprise me.

edit: long sentences=mistakes

i'm not sure how good an ATI Radeon 7200 is, if it already supports everything forget that, then you've got the fillrate/FSAA/filtering differences which can get large as they get big.

 

[nephalim]

I can personally say that with PJ64, if you have a high-end GFX card (Radeon 9000+, Geforce 4+,) then you can run just about any game full speed with a 1.0ghz PIII. This is from *personal experience,* so unless my system is magically special, or there are other factors (and there are, read on,) then I don't see how it could be wrong.
NOTE: The original card (The M4) I didn't really use with Jabo's with any of the higher requirement games due to graphics problems, so I can't make a direct comparison M4->M9. I used Glide64 mostly for my M4, and it's regarded as a faster GFX plugin. The M9 supports FSAA & Ansiotropic Filtering, which I am currently using, with everything at max quality settings.

One Example: Zelda Majora's Mask. With Glide64 + eVoodoo, and my M4, I got 40fps average. Now, with my M9, I get 60fps average. Whether it's attributed to the change in plugins or not, the fact still remains that *I get 60fps average with this fairly processor heavy game.* All the other games i've played with my new card I get full speed now. So if your GFX card doesn't matter, and it was the change in plugins, I still stick by my statement that a P3 1.0mhz is suitable for full speed on almost any game (except maybe something like Paper Mario.)

Another factor is sound, in fact sound is one of the biggest CPU hogs there is! I get anywhere from 20-40% CPU % for sound, and I have a decent sound card! Your sound card DOES make a difference, there is hardware acceleration from sound card just as there is from graphics cards. I have an ESS Maestro 3(i??)? FYI.

 

[Kahenraz]

I'd have to say that from past experience, 99% of the work is done by the cpu. I was able to run many games on my dual 933mhz p3 server while it used either the Voodoo3 3000 or the 8meg Vanta with flawless speed. Sometimes even better than my p4 1.4GHhz w/GeForce3 Ti500.

Now it has a Quadro2 Pro. :]

 

[Clements]

I agree. My uncle has a Pentium 4 1.4GHz (Not too bad) and a 32MB Riva TNT card (Crap) and yet still gets fullspeed in Perfect Dark with PJ64, default plugins, and it seems to outpace even my PC somehow. However, the graphics are less accurate, very noticable in Goldeneye where the menus are white and the textures are slightly wrong. It's still fullspeed thanks to the processor.

A CPU upgrade would give a speed boost, a graphics card upgrade from a below/minimum spec. to a recomended spec. would be more accurate.

 

[nephalim]

Well then, from my personal experience I would have to say that Glide64/eVoodoo is slower than Jabo's 1.5. Same machine, only difference between the two was video card (and 20vi/s.) If it's not the video card, Glide64/eVoodoo must not be as fast as I had been led (I think, at least, not sure exactly where I got that idea) to believe.

If it is almost 100% processor, then a P3-1ghz is enough to do full speed on almost any game as I have already stated. I also can say this from personal experience, as I have a 900mhz processor and can get 100% speed on every game i've played (using PJ64 even, the AFAIK most CPU exhaustive emu.)

The difference in video quality from a higher-end video card is undeniable and another story altogether.

I still think though, IMO, without further research into the specifics of what the situation is with my experience on my machine and the details of audio systems, that graphics cards and audio cards DO make a significant (when you are on a low spec machine, i.e. one that doesn't hit full speed, it's significant,) difference in emulation speed. Sound cards have hardware acceleration, just like graphics cards. Imagine if you had to do a 100% software graphics rendering and the CPU it would hog. For this reason, i'm nearly positive that your sound card has to make a difference, onboard crappy sound vs. a normal mid- or high-end sound card. Further research on my part would be necessary.

EDIT: Oh, I in no way intended to say that a Radeon 7500 to a Radeon 9x00 would in any way boost speed, that's not significant enough an upgrade AFAIK. I think the difference is only between really low-end cards and then "suitable" cards where it reaches a point that speed doesn't get any better by upgrading, but i'm just speculating.

 

[jack]

1ghz is the medium requirement. You'd need at least a 2ghz to emulate all games at full speed. Mk4, Zelda2, GE, PD are some examples of games needing such requirements.

Of course these requirements are intended for quality, ie perfect sound and smooth frames. You could always using hle audio or higher cf, but that's sorta cheating though.

 

[james.miller]

just to throw myself into to mix, my system runs perfect dark at >full speed @ 1600x1200 w 6xFSAA. (not surprising though).

Anyway, as i have found, n64 emulation in general is more graphics card dependant than psx emulation.

example:

celly-t 1.2ghz+softmodded r9500

n64 ~ full speed in around 90% of my games
psx ~ terrible. hardly managed 45fps in gt2 @ 640x480 and no eye candy.


xp1800+gf4 440mx

n64 ~ slow. around half the speed of the r9500 and celly-t combo it would seem.
psx ~ fast. gt2 was no problem for it.

jack: 2 ghz is not need for full speed. trust me.

 

[Doomulation]

Jack...I think he's right. Rather, he is.
But may I comment that I had a 1.4 ghz amd athlon processor with a gf2 mx400 before. When I upgraded to gf4 ti4200, i didn't get much speed increase. But in psx, you betcha i did. I could use the best settings in the gfx config and make it run full speed, which i coudn't before.

The speed on pj about remained the same, though.

 

[nephalim]

1ghz is the medium requirement. You'd need at least a 2ghz to emulate all games at full speed. Mk4, Zelda2, GE, PD are some examples of games needing such requirements.

Of course these requirements are intended for quality, ie perfect sound and smooth frames. You could always using hle audio or higher cf, but that's sorta cheating though.

I get full speed in MM (haven't tried just yet the others you have listed with my new setup, but have I tried a whole bunch of games,) with PJ64 1.5.1, Jabo's 1.5.1, default emulator/ROM settings (CF is either 1 or 2,) 16X Ansiotropic, 4X Quality AA (Smoothvision, this is a real performance hog on the GFX card,) Framebuffer Emulation on, 1400x1050 fullscreen & 12??x8?? Windowed, Jabo's 1.5 Sound (the default plugin (which I do believe is LLE,) max buffer,) let's see anything else? I have a P3 (mobile), 900mhz, Radeon M9 (9000 equiv.), So it IS possible to get full speed with a P3 1ghz on 95% of games, that "2ghz" requirement is totally bogus...I think the P4 really is a significant amount slower than the P3...at least that's what i've heard and keep seeing...

Do you want screenshots?

 

[Kahenraz]

I would again like to emphasize that I was getting full speed with my voodoo3 3000 using Jabo's d3d7 1.4. A fairly old video card.

My voodoo had 16mb of memory and my vanta had only 8megs. This leads me to believe that video memory also has no effect on emulation at all, as most, if not all the texture memory is put into your system's ram (correct me if I'm wrong).

To compare I was able to run mario card64 on my anchient pent. 200mhz, but unplayable, extreme lag. Same voodoo card. Since the upgraded cpu(s), I can now run games perfectly.

I would also suggest making sure that your system has the latest chipset drivers installed for your motherboard. My video card has been set to PCI mode for months because I did not realize that even though AGP was selected in the bios, if your OS lacks the chipset drivers to recognize the AGP slot, it will run the gpu at 16bit PCI speed.