Sorry but your totally wrong there. Having a "fast" computer incomparison to a older one does make a difference. But if your going to test it on games like System Shock then your going to run into slowness as they are very resource demanding (for their time) games, incomparison to say Syndicate for example.

To give you a frame of reference, System Shock CD is just baaarely playable on my 1.2GHz Athlon. I'm able to get up around ~9000-10000 cycles with frameskip set at 1 or 2, and I have to turn all the graphical settings down. SVGA mode is out of the question.

CPU power really, really does seem to be the deciding factor here. Having more than a decent amount of RAM and a good video card don't really seem to count for much. Start saving up for a 4GHz machine.

Maybe we should have an informal thread where people can post the performance they can get out of various machines, with cycle counts and system specs etc?

That is clear then, I needed some obvious examples concerning system specs versus game speeds. My PIII-600 did not seem to pull it off with dosboxed gameslike quarentine/system shock.

there is another 1700MHz system here I can try so...
But then again I can run about 90% of my old games perfectly from within win98, with sound that is. so I might just settle with that and leave dosbox for later times when 10GHz is the usual CPU speed.

For more speed, only thing to do is experiment with cpu cycles, and try with dynamic core.
10 GHz won't be a reality so soon. Problems with energy consumption on a 90 nm scale are too hard even for Intel which is quitting with P4 and focusing on Pentium M (a P3 derivative).

Just think how many years of emulator development (and new PC iterations) it took to have an accurate and fast Amiga emulation on a PC. And even now there are some Amiga 1200 games that will run verrrry slowly on the latest WinUAE, on the I-spend-millions-on-my-16-GHz-Pentium8 PCs 😁

On my PC : AMD Athlon XP1800+ with 700Mb of RAM, all games in general are slow exept clic and point game or gestion game ...

Cthulhus wrote:

On my PC : AMD Athlon XP1800+ with 700Mb of RAM, all games in general are slow exept clic and point game or gestion game ...

????? I have Athlon 1 Ghz and apart from games like System Shock the speed is ok for most of games.
Remember to switch off scalers etc.
Dynamic core in CVS is also very good.

Mirek

I have P4 2.53. 512 MB DDR 333, Radeon 9700 PRO and Magic Carpet 2 is running cca 3-5 FPS ... 🙁

Well, there are big differences between DOS games. Most of what I want to run is runnable even on my 1 Ghz athlon. But if somebody is more interested in the last generation of DOS games (which needed high end
486 or better), then he probably will have speed problems ...
In any case: if you did not modify default DOSBOX configuration in any way, there are almost certainly significant reserves (no scalers!, dynamic core, MPU 401 instead of SoundBlaster for music, frameskip, full screen, 16 bit desktop in Windows, trying different output methods etc...).

Mirek

By default DOSBox only runs with 2500 cycles or something... you need to raise that up to your limit on your computer, for 900 MHz it's probably about 5000.

My system:
1 Ghrz Athlon Thunderbird
win2k
256 MB
GF2
(though I don't think memory and GPU are important for dosbox)
DOSbox 0.61

My performance:
According to my recolection of back in the day, it seems just a tiny bit faster than my old 386-sx16.
I run it with cycles set to 2500 or 3000, and a frameskip of 1 or 2. If I set cycles higher, it speeds up some but sound skips a lot (even at 3000 sound skips a little). Speed keeps increasing though up to about 4000 cycles. Even with sound off, cycles up at 4k, and frameskipping high, it's still slower than any 486 I've ever seen, and some 386s.

Specific games performance:
Doom2: bad (2 fps?)
Privateer: very bad (1 fps?)
Star Control 2: a tiny bit faster than my 386-sx16 played it
Princess Maker 2: playable but a little slow. sound skips even at 2500
edit: lowered performance number for doom2 (I was being rediculously optimistic)

er.. have you read what mirekluza said?