My PC is officially done.

[ferrarifan]

hmm
if there's one emulator that doesn't really benefit from loads of cores is mame
demul is pretty much the same thing - maybe slightly less but single thread performance is still the #1 culprit for slowdowns and dips,specially in those dreamcast CE games
no idea about "Naomi Multiboard emulation" but still..
of course,rpcs3,xenia and really recent emulators do require loads of cores but mame and demul..not so much

also,that gpu is quite entry level but i guess it's enough for supermodel
it will definitely prevent you from upscaling stuff / playing stuff at really high resolutions though
not a big deal at all if you ask me but some people want to upscale everything to 437k
but what about pc games ? an older 950-960 would have been a lot better for probably just 10-20 bucks more ?
maybe you didn't have a psu for those power hungry cards

personally,i always prefer to wait and buy older "mid / high end" stuff at cheaper prices instead of buying more recent low-ish / mid stuff
i think that in the end it is always a better idea

TBH, MAME is a very awesome arcade emulator but, It hogs the CPU when it comes to 3D games. However, Games like Ridge Racer and San Francisco Rush for example reqiure extra horsepower like 3 or 4 Ghz. Since i have the i5, the games run flawlessly without slowdown. The i3 that i tested had a bit slowdown.

[ferrarifan]

hmm
if there's one emulator that doesn't really benefit from loads of cores is mame
demul is pretty much the same thing - maybe slightly less but single thread performance is still the #1 culprit for slowdowns and dips,specially in those dreamcast CE games
no idea about "Naomi Multiboard emulation" but still..
of course,rpcs3,xenia and really recent emulators do require loads of cores but mame and demul..not so much

also,that gpu is quite entry level but i guess it's enough for supermodel
it will definitely prevent you from upscaling stuff / playing stuff at really high resolutions though
not a big deal at all if you ask me but some people want to upscale everything to 437k
but what about pc games ? an older 950-960 would have been a lot better for probably just 10-20 bucks more ?
maybe you didn't have a psu for those power hungry cards

personally,i always prefer to wait and buy older "mid / high end" stuff at cheaper prices instead of buying more recent low-ish / mid stuff
i think that in the end it is always a better idea

Here's the page from MAME website. https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/FAQ:Performance. In fact, MAME will utilize more than one core. Since i upgraded my i5-4670k and it became a huge improvement in performance. Plus i recently upgraded my GPU which is the GTX 950 SC.

[doteater]

i was going to write a moderately long reply but i have changed my mind
it's still a well known *fact* that mame is 99% about your single threaded performance
therefore i don't think there's space for a discussion , i would simply end up repeating what i already wrote months ago
so believe what you want to believe

that page you linked like if it was a magnificent trump card is pretty wack / inaccurate anyway

↓

Upgrade your graphics card, or update your present card's drivers. Swapping your generic (cheap) card for a high-quality (not cheap) card will certainly boost performance. If you are using on-board (integrated) video, you'll see a great performance increase by simply getting a new graphics card. Check your graphics card drivers, too. Newer drivers — especially for cheaper cards — can make all the difference.

[ferrarifan]

i was going to write a moderately long reply but i have changed my mind
it's still a well known *fact* that mame is 99% about your single threaded performance
therefore i don't think there's space for a discussion , i would simply end up repeating what i already wrote months ago
so believe what you want to believe

that page you linked like if it was a magnificent trump card is pretty wack / inaccurate anyway

↓

Upgrade your graphics card, or update your present card's drivers. Swapping your generic (cheap) card for a high-quality (not cheap) card will certainly boost performance. If you are using on-board (integrated) video, you'll see a great performance increase by simply getting a new graphics card. Check your graphics card drivers, too. Newer drivers — especially for cheaper cards — can make all the difference.

According to MAME from ther website. Does MAME benefit from SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) / HT (Hyper-Threading) / dual cores?
Yes, MAME uses multi-threading to allow some tasks to be split up across multiple CPUs/cores. In addition to the main emulation thread, MAME may create additional threads for the following tasks, depending on the system being emulated and your configuration:
Up to three threads for triangle rendering when emulating accelerated 3D graphics hardware, including those 3dfx Voodoo
Up to three matrix solver threads for emulating analog sound synthesis, TTL logic, and other analog/digital circuitry
A texture upload thread when using bgfx video output (for uploading textures from MAME to your GPU)
A thread to handle MAME's output handlers and built-in HTTP server
Additional threads for OpenMP loop acceleration (requires special compile options, not enabled by default)
In pathological cases, MAME can make use of eight or more CPU cores. Additionally, it helps if you have at least one CPU core to handle the OS and background tasks so MAME doesn't have to relinquish the CPU. Note that parallelisation also increases memory bandwidth and cache requirements. MAME's working set is somewhat larger than a typical benchmark suite, or an AV compressor.