Lowest Program Clocks.


PokeParadox

Founder of Pirate Games - Penjin Coder
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We all want our batteries to last a little longer, so it occured to me that this sort of list could be useful. It's debatable how much battery life you can save by underclocking, but I think it makes a little difference.
Just post the minimum clock speed where you can still use the program comfortably. You can obviously use these in a script, or set them up in Gmenu2X.

All my timings are with the RAM tweak, which lets me underclock a teeny bit more :)

eBook Reader - 75MHz
Image Viewer - 100MHz
Music Player - 75MHz (100MHz for higher bitrate content)

ASCIIPong - 150MHz
Deal or No Deal - 150MHz
Duke3D - 140MHz
Commander Kean - 215MHz
Doom - 215MHz
NetHack - 80MHz
Quake - 200Mhz (200+ will run better though)
Spout - 80MHz
Vektar (Freeware) - 150MHz
Zooov1 - 150MHz

DrMD
MD - 200MHz
SMS -90MHz
GG - 80MHz

GNUboy2X - 180MHz
GPFCE - 215MHz
RACE - 160MHz
SquidgeSNES - 266MHz
PicoDrive - 220MHz

EDIT: Made a few updates to the list with feedback from Woogal, I'll try and add stuff to this list so it's easier for people to see
 
Why on earth are you overclocking Duke3D? 200mhz is more than enough, and you can probably go down to 133mhz (although I've never tried playing it for any length of time at that speed so I suppose it could slow down a bit later on). I also find Quake very playable at 200mhz, but I'll admit things do get better the higher you can clock. Saying 266mhz is a minimum to be playable is just ridiculous.
 
The music player and ebook reader i have at 75mhz with out any problems, the music player only starts to give when there are high quality ogg's but my mp3's at 192kb/sec playback just fine. The image viewer can be set at 100mhz without any really big drop in photo loading time.
 
I've played MP3s (~160kbps) at ~25 MHz before. A 400 Kbps OGG Vorbis file did not handle as well, it needed closer to 70 MHz, but that's much more stressful. Also, 400kbps OGG Vorbis is unbelievable overkill. A Vorbis file at 128kbits sec sounds a good as an MP3 >256kbps usually.. :)
 
Epicenter posted on Oct 5 2006 at 07:02 PM said:
I've played MP3s (~160kbps) at ~25 MHz before. A 400 Kbps OGG Vorbis file did not handle as well, it needed closer to 70 MHz, but that's much more stressful. Also, 400kbps OGG Vorbis is unbelievable overkill. A Vorbis file at 128kbits sec sounds a good as an MP3 >256kbps usually.. :)

Why can't you use MP3s instead of OGGs in your game?

Or maybe just WAVs, those take much less power...
 
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wav's are HUGE and someone said that the libmp3 or w/e for the SDL was all bugged up and not working right, hence that Beat2x uses ogg.
 
Shikaku posted on Oct 5 2006 at 05:13 PM said:
Why can't you use MP3s instead of OGGs in your game?

Or maybe just WAVs, those take much less power...
MP3s use less raw CPU power than Vorbis, but they're not enough of a drop for it to be really significant. I am heavily considering using ADPCM instead of either. That's a good comprimise if it's not 44100hz, just 22050hz or so.

wav's are HUGE and someone said that the libmp3 or w/e for the SDL was all bugged up and not working right, hence that Beat2x uses ogg.
I don't think anything is wrong with SDL-Mixer's support for Mp3, but it's Floating point heavy and slow, so you'd prefer to use LibMad. However that has licensing complications; if you use it you MUST make your program open source, or provide the .o files, or some other such nonsense .. it's easier to use OGG which is free of such limitations and which is less than half the size for the same quality...
 
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Nethack is fine at about 80 MHz, only the loading times grow a bit but it's still not bad at all. Going even lower than that, the scrolling might get a little choppy but it's still perfectly playable.
 
I have had gnuboy running fine at 170MHz for everything I've tried (I'm sure there are some other things which need more), and 150MHz is sufficient for most things (Zelda needs 170).
 
hmmm interesting, I'll do some experimenting with gnuboy since you've mentioned this.

I must make a point that some of my "high" clock settings are from when I had the LCD setting set to a value which made things looked jumpy all the time. I now have it to a more sensible setting.

EDIT: I just tried out gnuboy at 170 and the only thing I could see was the intro for Link's Awakening was a bit slow... otherwise it seems ok! :) I'm going to put 180 to be safe.
 
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