I’m thinking of upgrading my FX-8120 (3.1 GHz) to FX-8350 (4.0 GHz) to play the Saturn games. Will this change significantly increase the FPS in the Mednafen core without lags?
My PC specs:
Thanks!
I have the 8350 at 4.0 and the mednafen saturn has some lag on some games, and trying out Virtua Cop never went fullspeed most of the time. I just use UoYabause (or Yaba Sanshiro) standalone emulator instead.
As I recall, you will also want to check how your CPU runs in single-thread. That’s what most emulators rely on. It’s possible to have a high GHZ rating, but not great single-thread performance.
For reference, I have an Intel i7 4790-k @ 4.0Ghz and I run saturn great - at least the games I’ve tried. I haven’t tried them all or anything.
You can check those measurements here: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
if you have the cash to burn, buy the fastest cpu that works great with single-threaded task, which Intel would excel over others(if there are indeed others). Not sure if an i5 vs i7 in single threads does have significant difference(or even an i3). But to be honest this is not a good benchmark or reference since Saturn is an WIP core and performance will vary depending on system and the games its running.
just IMHO
Yeah AMD’s CPU single-thread performance is pretty low. I think the highest on that readout is like 1,500 or so, while Intel dominates the top performers.
I’ve learned the hard way that the best kind of build for emulation tends to be Intel + Nvidia.
Thanks for all replies and tips!
AMD Ryzen or intel.
For reference, I get full speed saturn emulation in the games I’ve tried with an i5 6500 @ stock clocks. Might be better to find a used Intel rig?
I’ve been playing with the Beetle Saturn core as of late all with Sandy Bridge CPUs (Intel Core i3 2120, Core i5 2320, and 2500) and here’s what I’ve found. Just about anything that’s 2D based runs locked at 60, even Radiant Silvergun. All but the 2500 I have to enable threaded video to get many of them to run at full speed. Quite surprisingly the game that none of them can run at full speed no matter the settings in Virtua Racing. Now I know that will probably break noone’s heart, but it is a good game to try to test to see how good your CPU will do in most games. I can run Burning Rangers better than I can run Virtua Racing lol. Most likely it’s due to the extremely poor coding and optimization of Virtua Racing since it already has a hard time running on real hardware. I’m sure if I had atleast a Haswell or especially a Skylake CPU that Saturn would be a non issue since most games run about 3 frames shy of 60. The future finally looks bright for Saturn. I constantly worry about the day when my Saturn drive kicks the bucket.