Computer Components
Introduction
This page aims to describe PC hardware and their advantages as they relate to the most popular emulator, MAME.
Intel Versus AMD
This will likely be an ever changing problem, as both manufacturers will continue to outdue eachother.
May 7th 2006:
- AMD is better in general right now. [1]
- The PSX driver strongly prefers Intel, by up to 35% in some cases. [2]
Video Cards
MAME does not take advantage of advanced Video Cards. However there are some decent gains that can be made from even the most basic of cards by offloading work from the CPU to the Video Card. AGP cards with Fastwrite or, likely, PCI-E cards will give you a boost in speeds. [3]
CPU Architecture
MAME does not benefit from Dual CPU (SMP), Dual Core, nor Hyper-threading. [4] The incremental gain of being able to offload, for instance, your operating system's thread onto it's own CPU is rather negligible.
Speculation information on "reverse hyperthreading". [5]
