About Emus Performance ( Gba Emu, Pico, Snes)

[renejr902]

1. i want to know the performance of the Wiz gba emu gpsp.

On my gp2x the emu was good but not great with all games. games like mariokart was too slow for me.

But on my PSP the same emu was running mariokart near perfect.

SO is the wiz gba emu run like gp2x or psp ? or better than both ?



2. Is the Wiz picodrive performance like gp2x near perfect or like psp running great but not as good as gp2x.


3. Same question about snes. Snes is running a lot better with psp than gp2x. But is the wiz performance better than gp2x and psp ( the last snes version) AND DOES IT RUN FULL SCALED ? i dont want a snes square in the middle of the screen.


note: i will buy the wiz the week or within one month. so i dont want bad surprise.

For me actually, i think the wiz snes and gba and picodrive performance are near perfect for all games, except snes fx chip like mariokart... i hope that lol




note 2: i just read on another tread something about snes emu. it seem the snes emu is NOT running well like psp snes emu. im a little dissapointed about that. it said secret of mana run 60 fps only with transparency off , but psp run this games 60fps with transparency and sound....

 

[Enverex]

AND DOES IT RUN FULL SCALED ? i dont want a snes square in the middle of the screen.

You can answer this for yourself for any emulator. For something to run full screen, the original resolution of the console needs to match the resolution of your device's LCD or be directly divisible by it. So if your screen is 320x240 then unless the thing you are emulating is 320x240 (or 160x120, 80x60, 40x30, etc) then it wont be full-screen. The difference between the two resolutions will be the amount of black you have around the edge. So if you are emulating something 300x200 on your 320x240 screen you will have 10px of black either side of the screen and 20px of black at the top and bottom.

 

[DaveC]

AND DOES IT RUN FULL SCALED ? i dont want a snes square in the middle of the screen.

You can answer this for yourself for any emulator. For something to run full screen, the original resolution of the console needs to match the resolution of your device's LCD or be directly divisible by it. So if your screen is 320x240 then unless the thing you are emulating is 320x240 (or 160x120, 80x60, 40x30, etc) then it wont be full-screen. The difference between the two resolutions will be the amount of black you have around the edge. So if you are emulating something 300x200 on your 320x240 screen you will have 10px of black either side of the screen and 20px of black at the top and bottom.

Well unless you stretch it. It will look like crap in most cases but some don't care how bad it looks they just want to use the whole screen.

Generally I hate the look of scaled images. On the Wiz though with it's small screen I tend to scale if it has a decent smooth horizontal mode like Temper, Picodrive etc. does. If it just scales up using the blocky pixels I don't use it.

 

[Enverex]

AND DOES IT RUN FULL SCALED ? i dont want a snes square in the middle of the screen.

You can answer this for yourself for any emulator. For something to run full screen, the original resolution of the console needs to match the resolution of your device's LCD or be directly divisible by it. So if your screen is 320x240 then unless the thing you are emulating is 320x240 (or 160x120, 80x60, 40x30, etc) then it wont be full-screen. The difference between the two resolutions will be the amount of black you have around the edge. So if you are emulating something 300x200 on your 320x240 screen you will have 10px of black either side of the screen and 20px of black at the top and bottom.

Well unless you stretch it. It will look like crap in most cases but some don't care how bad it looks they just want to use the whole screen.

Generally I hate the look of scaled images. On the Wiz though with it's small screen I tend to scale if it has a decent smooth horizontal mode like Temper, Picodrive etc. does. If it just scales up using the blocky pixels I don't use it.

Well yeah, my post was about scaling properly, without uneven stretching (which as you pointed out would normally look awful).

 

[renejr902]

I play all my emulators full scaled even on my psp and gp2x ang gp32. i dont have any problem with that.

1.So i suppose like you said that no full scale option are exist for the wiz snes emu right now ?


2. I would like to know if the gba emu run near full speed with any games like the psp version ?

3. is the gb color and mono emu is full scaled too with fullspeed ?
you can answer my previous questions too. thanks

note: i have difficulty to play emulators that cant run full scaled and need frameskip.
its the reason why i play most of time emulators with my psp. most emus can be full scaled with no frameskip. and the wiz screen is so small i will not play with a emu that cant be full scaled. my eyes are not enough good. i prefer the gp32 over the gp2x because some emus full scaled in a better way. even some of them run better. and the gp32 d-pad is a lot better than gp2x. so i bought the gp2x but dont like it a lot like others handheld, except for picodrive. so i want to be sure i will play with the wiz before buying it.

thanks for answers.

 

[DaveC]

I find the emulators that are scaled up on the PSP are a blurry mess. They use this horrid bi-linear filtering that makes everything look so fuzzy and it blurs colors together so bad it removes detail and contrast. Fullscreen on PSP stretches 4:3 games to 16:9 which makes the aspect ratio all wrong with squashed looking characters. Add to that the awful response time of the slow ghosty PSP LCD and it gives me a headache.

If that doesn't bother you though you probably should stick with the PSP. GBA does run better on the PSP. Picodrive on Wiz is pretty much perfect though.

 

[renejr902]

For the psp ghostling its not funny but its not so bad when you got accustomed to it. and i dont use the bilinear filtering smoothing for all emu. the nes emu look great without smoothing when full scaled. for me at least and for snes the emu got a fullscreen clipped option, the screen got the good ratio but miss the bottom of the screen, that is not necessary anyway. i play with this mode. in this the ratio is 4:3 pixel for pixel, but miss the bottom of the screen. But i understand you for one thing. its a horror to play picodrive with the psp. Sonic is blurring and ghostling. all the background look very blurry. but the snes, gba, gbc emu are awesome, not much blurring.

Anyway, i love handheld and emulation i will happy to buy the wiz too, because i nearly bought all handheld on the market(gp32nlu, flu, blu, zodiac, gp2x...) , but this time, i want a handheld i will play with it a lot of time. i bought the gp2x, but i played a few times. because i prefer the gp32. so i want to be sure.

i need a small handheld like the wiz for to go. i dont always bring my gp2x, gp32 or psp.

But i reaaly want a oled handheld, this way when i played sonic games, the blur will disappear like a crt tv can do. Isnt ? and i love real black.


But im very disappointed that you said that gpsp is not better on the wiz than PSP. I cant believe a 533mhz handheld cant beat the 333mhz psp. so i suppose gpsp is not very optimized for the wiz.
i play a lot of gba mariokart. so i was hoping being able to play mariokart at least fast like the psp can do.

i wait your reply DaveC about the reason why the wiz cant do better than psp. i suppose in hardware the wiz is a not enough powerful vs the psp. thanks for letting me know about gpsp on the wiz.

( sorry for my bad english)

i always love gamepark product but i want to spend money only if i will play with the wiz. i play mostly nes, genesis, gamegear and gba and snes in order of importance. a full scaled nes emulator with no problem will sold me a wiz right away. but i think i have to wait for this feature. at least picodrive is full screen.

 

[muterobert]

As has already been mentioned, 'performance' is an incredibly subjective matter and furthermore very specific to individual applications. On the one hand, the Wiz rapes the PSP in raw CPU terms, but memory bandwidth seems to be causing issues with some Emulators.

Im broad terms, people seem to suggest that the Wiz may be better at certain tasks then the PSP and Vice Versa.

As always with any hardware though, tricks and tweaks are discovered when knowledge of the hardware is found. Homebrew for hacked PSPs has obviously been around for quite some time now and therefore the community knowledgebase maybe far more extensive, even taking into account previous generations of Gamepark devices.

As ever, it's going to be case of 'wait and see' whilst our telented community coders get to work.

In some ways, it wouldn't have been any fun if everything ported to the Wiz worked brilliantly immediately.

 

[renejr902]

i bought it, i will receive it within 3 days.

thanks for answer.

i will try to overclock some emus if the speed dont satified me !

Is it really dangerous to overclock the wiz. What can happen if i overclock a little too much.

( i modded my two gp32 to 216mhz and 240mhz and dont have any problem with them. even the gp2x overclocked work well. but is it the same for the wiz. i dont want a dead wiz the first day. )

 

[DaveC]

But im very disappointed that you said that gpsp is not better on the wiz than PSP. I cant believe a 533mhz handheld cant beat the 333mhz psp. so i suppose gpsp is not very optimized for the wiz.
i play a lot of gba mariokart. so i was hoping being able to play mariokart at least fast like the psp can do.

i wait your reply DaveC about the reason why the wiz cant do better than psp. i suppose in hardware the wiz is a not enough powerful vs the psp. thanks for letting me know about gpsp on the wiz.

You can't just compare clock speeds and then pick the one with the biggest number. It don't work that way. For example if you could clock a Z80 to 800 MHz that wouldn't mean that it would outperform a 500 MHz Pentium.

I don't know for sure but I think the reason GBA is so slow on the Wiz is because the memory access is slow on the Wiz. The PSP has a GPU that can offload some of the work and I imagine the PSP has better memory access. The one to ask about that would be Exophase as he has coded low level for both. I am just guessing but he would know exactly why GPsp is slower on the Wiz.

SNES is slow because it is a quick port from the GP2X with no optimizing. I know some coders here will say that the Wiz is not much different and there is not much to optimise from the GP2X and they are right but there are a few RAM tweaks that could help PocketSNES a bit.

 

[renejr902]

thanks for answer

 

[renejr902]

i just saw mariokart gba on the wiz at youtube , i dont know if the guy has overclocked the system, but the game run great, maybe as good as psp. But i suppose he overclocked it. i will overclocked it while playing gba emu. i cant wait to receive it now

 

[Exophase]

I don't know for sure but I think the reason GBA is so slow on the Wiz is because the memory access is slow on the Wiz. The PSP has a GPU that can offload some of the work and I imagine the PSP has better memory access. The one to ask about that would be Exophase as he has coded low level for both. I am just guessing but he would know exactly why GPsp is slower on the Wiz.

I'm not sure how much any of this is true, the only thing the PSP version uses the GPU for is scaling. Actually I'm not really sure why gpSP would be slower on Wiz! I think it is correct that cache line fills + evicts are much slower on the Wiz, it's something like 150 cycles vs maybe 60-70 or so on the PSP. hlide could say better, I think. I've had a hard time finding hard information on it.

The CPU cores between the two are extremely different, but in theory the ARM one should be a little better than the MIPS one, not the other way around.

 

[renejr902]

nice to know. thanks exophase

 

[Enverex]

Exophase: Why would they choose to use MIPS processors over ARM for things such as the PSP? Are there any advantages of MIPS in this scenario over ARM?

 

[DaveC]

[ I think it is correct that cache line fills + evicts are much slower on the Wiz, it's something like 150 cycles vs maybe 60-70 or so on the PSP. hlide could say better, I think.

OMG that is terrible.. I am surprised the Wiz even boots up with that abysmal performance, 150 vs. 60? Ouch, that's gotta hurt. Is it because of crap design of the Wiz or the ARM CPU itself?

Well I still like it, those games that I love that are lines on black backgrounds still look good

 

[Exophase]

OMG that is terrible.. I am surprised the Wiz even boots up with that abysmal performance, 150 vs. 60? Ouch, that's gotta hurt. Is it because of crap design of the Wiz or the ARM CPU itself?

Well I still like it, those games that I love that are lines on black backgrounds still look good

It's all relative, on a PC you might get cycles in that neighborhood too, or somewhat higher (but don't listen to anyone that says accessing memory takes thousands of cycles though). A cache linefill + writeback eviction is not a minor amount of work, you have to store and load an entire 32bytes each. The writeback should not stall the CPU but in my tests they were back to back so it could have been pushed further than it could take. In other words, this is perhaps worst case performance. My PSP numbers could be way off because I didn't do testing there, I just took some numbers hlide had. Maybe he could answer better?

If there's any issue here it's that Wiz's memory is 16bit DDR SDRAM on a 133MHz bus while PSP's is 32bit DDR on a 166MHz bus. So the bus width is presumably half on Wiz and the CPU to bus divider is also twice as much, resulting in 4x as many cycles for bandwidth. Then you factor in latency for the RAM access and whatever delays the cache controller itself adds. The Wiz's RAM runs at CL2, while the PSP's is rated for CL3 (at 166MHz/6ns), so the Wiz might actually have better latency.

 

[Exophase]

Exophase: Why would they choose to use MIPS processors over ARM for things such as the PSP? Are there any advantages of MIPS in this scenario over ARM?

I don't know, but I could give some guesses.

- They've already used MIPS in PS1 and PS2, which were both good chip choices at the time. When PS1 was developed you'd have been hard pressed to find an ARM chip as fast, and when with PS2 its even more pronounced since it has a superscalar core, several years before ARM had one. MIPS were long associated with high performance workstations so it makes sense that earlier 3D consoles had them. So they had an existing good opinion of the chips and probably good relations with MIPS for licensing it and making custom designs.
- Maybe they thought it'd give them some advantages/ease in writing PS1 emulation on PSP, which I'm sure was planned early on.
- Since they'd used MIPS extensively, using it again meant potential reuse of both hardware and software tools.
- Arguably, the real core distinction of the PSP's CPU is the VFPU coprocessor. Maybe they like the MIPS coprocessor model more, or it's easier to do these kinds of custom designs for some reason.

Fun fact: PSP actually has an ARM9 too. It's running in the WiFi module. I doubt you can run user code on it, and even if you could the communication between it and the rest of the system would be very bandwidth limited. Plus it's probably ran at a very low clockspeed and has very little RAM. Why Marvell chose to use ARM9 as opposed to a lighter CPU is anyone's guess - ARM7 is more common in these sort of modules.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

1. i want to know the performance of the Wiz gba emu gpsp.
SO is the wiz gba emu run like gp2x or psp ? or better than both ?

The wiz GBA emu runs a good majority of games at fullspeed without overclocking. With overclocking a bit you can run things like mariokart without problems, the only games you can't really run very well at the moment are the psuedo-3d games like the tony hawk series, etc. The emulator has a decent scaling function that doesn't get too blurry on the wiz screen in comparison with the PSP screen.

2. Is the Wiz picodrive performance like gp2x near perfect or like psp running great but not as good as gp2x.
The wiz picodrive performance is PERFECT. Every single game that I've tried so far runs great, there's no scaling required because most games are 320x200 or so on the genesis, and sega CD works very well, too (played sonic CD, Shining force, and Lunar 2).

3. Same question about snes. Snes is running a lot better with psp than gp2x. But is the wiz performance better than gp2x and psp ( the last snes version) AND DOES IT RUN FULL SCALED ? i dont want a snes square in the middle of the screen.
The SNES emulator for the wiz runs a lot of games pretty fast, and with overclocking you can expect pretty much every game to be playable, with the exception of maybe yoshi's island. There IS scaling on the SNES emulator, but it isn't entirely even. It's not terrible to look at, but it's not perfect either.

note: i will buy the wiz the week or within one month. so i dont want bad surprise.
It won't be a bad surprise, trust me

note 2: i just read on another tread something about snes emu. it seem the snes emu is NOT running well like psp snes emu. im a little dissapointed about that. it said secret of mana run 60 fps only with transparency off , but psp run this games 60fps with transparency and sound....

Secret of mana does, however, run at around 35FPS with sound, transparencies, and scaling, which is more than playable, and using a European rom that's close to 100% speed. The game doesn't slow down at all, really, and I can't tell the difference between the game running here and the game running on a TV or a PC or anything else. But if 60FPS is what you're looking for, you won't find it with the current version of the SNES emulator for the wiz, at least not yet. But it IS beyond playable, and I can't really notice much of a difference between playing on the wiz and playing on a PC emulator. With the FPS counter off you wouldn't be able to tell

It's strange, because people get very FPS happy when it comes to games, even if the game is very smooth to play. That FPS counter messes with your heads! IT'S BRAINWASHING I SAY! BRAINWASHING!

 

[renejr902]

i have the wiz some days now.

But definately the gpsp (gba) emu runs faster on psp. Except for mario kart that runs better on the wiz. Sonic advance, mario advance, castlevania series RUN FULLSPEED without slow down on psp, but on the wiz theses games have some slow down . my wiz gpsp run at 800mhz.

i supposed the cycle ram speed thing is important otherwise i cant understand a psp 333mhz can run better gba games vs a Wiz at 800 mhz.
But mariokart speed is better on the wiz.


but for pocketsnes im very surprised, F-zero at 50 fps for the wiz, psp can only to 20 to 30 fps.