new cpu build

[karadaniano]

well cause i want to play daytona usa 2 at fullspeed and other mame 3d cpu demanding games, and then upload them with a nice resolution and make a decent recording

im building a new pc
this are the components:

Asus P8p67-m Lga 1155 Rev. B3
2 hard drives: samsung caviar green of 1 tb and the one i have at the moment of 320 gb
6 gb ram gskill of 1600 mhz ripjaws? sniper?
intel i5 2500k
geforce 9800 gt ---> 280 gtx in afuture

i saw some different brands of ram from g skil, sniper and ripjaws, since i see the sniper is a few bucks cheaper than ripjaws,
wich is the exactly difference within them? should i go for the sniper?

[hectic]

Gskill is what I use. 4gb will be enough. Bear in mind that you will need a 64bit operating system, else any ram over and above ~3.2gb will not be seen by the OS due to the addressing limitations of x86 architecture.

Your graphics card will be a bottleneck. It's pointless running an i5 2500k with a tonne of DDR3 if you're planning on using that card. Get yourself a GTX 560.

[CharlieRam]

Hi, first post here. I was under the impression that CPU is the deciding factor when running emulators and so long as the GPU can handle your framerates (and a 9800gt should do easily in most games) then it should be good enough for an emulator, Is this wrong because I was planning on upgrading my driving cabinet for Supermodel and I was looking to just get a new motherboard, processor and ram, also is there no point in going quad core? as I believe most emulators including this one only utilise 2 cores or will this change in the future?
A lot of questions I know but it would be good to be sure before I rip my cab apart

[hectic]

Bart would be the person to ask re: the bias between CPU and GPU reliance in Supermodel. While you are correct (and it sounds like you're a MAME guy at a guess?) that CPU is important, it really does depend on the emulator in question. Plenty of people on here have experienced issues regarding shaders / general GPU issues (see here for example), which is why I plumped for the 560. It's what I have, so obviously I'm biased. Having said that, some users report running an 8800GT with little problems. Certainly, with newer Supermodel revisions on the horizons, the demand on computer crunch should lessen; rather than increase, so perhaps they'll be OK with that GPU?

If you're going to go down the new processor route, are there any - decent - processors out there that aren't quad-core? The Sandybridge (and the AMD equivalent) range are all quads and most people wouldn't recommend anything else these days, surely?

[CharlieRam]

Yes, I am a MAME guy but I am also a Model 2, Demul(naomi 1 and 2) and now a Supermodel guy
While it is true that there are better Quad and six core chips out there they don't always best a fast dual core cpu and its all down to cost really.

[Bart]

While you are correct (and it sounds like you're a MAME guy at a guess?) that CPU is important, it really does depend on the emulator in question.

I'm not a MAME developer. Just Supermodel.

Plenty of people on here have experienced issues regarding shaders / general GPU issues (see here for example), which is why I plumped for the 560. It's what I have, so obviously I'm biased. Having said that, some users report running an 8800GT with little problems. Certainly, with newer Supermodel revisions on the horizons, the demand on computer crunch should lessen; rather than increase, so perhaps they'll be OK with that GPU?

Hopefully, future versions will be faster, but I should point out that my life is really busy and I have other projects that desperately need tending to for a while, so I don't know when I'll get back to Supermodel again (maybe not until December). For now, it's going to require a beefy system.

Regarding the relative importance of the GPU and CPU, I don't really have a clear answer for that. Yes, Supermodel is very dependent on the GPU. Although it caches models, it still has to upload a lot of data each frame: two 512x512 pixel texture maps for the 2D graphics (though this does not appear to be a bottleneck even on low end GPUs), two 4x4 matrices for every single model instance present on the screen, and vertex data for any new models that have to be decoded and cached for the current frame. Most important of all, the pixel shaders do a lot of work sampling and interpolating textures and computing the spotlight effect. They are the single biggest performance bottleneck on the graphics side, I believe.

The CPU is also responsible for loads of work: the PowerPC emulator is an interpreter, originally written by Ville and very similar to MAME's PowerPC interpreter. Additionally, up to two additional 68Ks and a Z80 CPU are emulated, also with interpreters, and all audio is rendered in software (like every other emulator): SCSP plus an MPEG decoder.

Basically, there are two bottlenecks and whichever is the narrower will limit overall performance. CPU speed affects Supermodel's performance in a predictable manner, all other things being equal. The impact of GPU architecture is very non-linear, however, and this is what I think may be confusing. Once you get to a sufficiently modern architecture (lots of shader units, intelligent drivers), the GPU burden is completely alleviated and you are left at the mercy of your CPU. I can't say for sure which GPU is the "bare minimum" but I'm pretty sure any high-end Nvidia or ATI GPU going back as far as 2.5-3 years ought to be sufficient. The 3GHz+ CPUs are definitely enough (a dynarec would dramatically lower this requirement). It seems to be the case that some 2.5+ GHz processors also do the trick but I'm not sure precisely which models and clock speeds.

If you're going to go down the new processor route, are there any - decent - processors out there that aren't quad-core? The Sandybridge (and the AMD equivalent) range are all quads and most people wouldn't recommend anything else these days, surely?

For my new system, I snagged a i5-2500K for $180. I agree that you might as well go quad core. Supermodel explicitly runs up to three threads (PowerPC+graphics+UI in one, 2x68K+SCSP+MPEG in another, and drive board Z80 in the third), and there are probably at least one or two more threads spawned by the sound API for audio playback and the OpenGL drivers. You probably won't notice any difference beyond two cores, however (the drive board thread is particularly lightweight and could have been handled in one of the others).

[hectic]

Brilliant info - Thanks Bart. Although my MAME comment was aimed not at you, but at the poster I was replying to, as his comment about CPU grunt being the emulation silver bullet sounded like a MAME user (since MAME relies only on CPU power). That's not a criticism; just an observation.

[karadaniano]

Brilliant info - Thanks Bart. Although my MAME comment was aimed not at you, but at the poster I was replying to, as his comment about CPU grunt being the emulation silver bullet sounded like a MAME user (since MAME relies only on CPU power). That's not a criticism; just an observation.

that's right, i will get an i5 2500k to, and its the best option for me to oc your cpu, (also the stock speeds have great performance on mame cpu intensive games.) since the desktop games need a good cpu and a great video card,
and emulators need a great cpu and a good card

[CharlieRam]

Brilliant info - Thanks Bart. Although my MAME comment was aimed not at you, but at the poster I was replying to, as his comment about CPU grunt being the emulation silver bullet sounded like a MAME user (since MAME relies only on CPU power). That's not a criticism; just an observation.

While it is true that MAME doesn't use hardware acceleration for the graphics, Demul certainly does and Naomi 2 systems are quite powerful, one of my cabinets runs all the compatable games fine on Demul and it has a fairly low spec GT240 512mb graphics card and a Phenom II X2 555BE processor, I know Demul is a lot further down the developement path than supermodel but it does highlight the fact that the proceesor is still a key component.
It would be interesting to see someone with a top spec CPU try different GPU's (if they have any lying around!) until they find how low they can go before it affects the performance of supermodel, it may give surprising results and then we all will know where we need to spend our hard earned, I have quite a few GPU's but unfortunately no top spec CPU yet
One more thing I haven't mentioned yet... Thank you BART, Job well done for such an early release. I am now able to play a lot more of my favourite arcade games

[Arbee]

I wouldn't assume MAME will always want only 2 cores, either

Cave SH-3 games (Espgaluda II, Ibara, etc, etc) will be multithreaded and have sound/music in the next release, for instance.