Nice. I have always been an AMD fan but I keep reading that Conroe processors deliver up to 40% performance boost compared to AMD most powerful ones.

Yeah, and the fact that they cost a fraction of the top end AMD CPUs while being able to out-perform them ... definately a great thing for DOSBOX if the technology breaks through.

Yes, it's true. All the benchmarks say that Intel has finally caught back up to AMD. Actually, some of their latest P4s before Conroe were at least acceptable, though you still benefitted a bit more from a high end AMD in certain things. Conroe, however, means AMD has to do something and fast because it's doing games and everything better as well as being efficient with power and such (one key feature of Athlon 64 was that it was built on mobile technology, so the extra power saving and other such things built in meant it ran cooler and more reliable than later P4s, but, here Conroe has caught up as well and Intel users with these I think won't be having to worry so much about their CPU shooting up well past 60C all the time like they have to with Preshott and co.)

Actually, from what I hear, Intel isn't really doing so great and those chips wouldn't normally cost so little, but, they are trying to wage a price war. They can't be operating at a loss though as that would hurt even worse, so I'd say maybe grab them while they're hot as they may go up later, but, I could be wrong (just a guess here.)

As for whether Conroe is a DOSBox dream or not, I'd say it's probably still not powerful enough for the REALLY heavy games (maybe stuff like Tomb Raider?) but, having seen what my 2.4GHz San Diego can do (think Athlon 64 4000+ as it's essentially the same thing) I'd say that by looking at how far ahead the Conroe is, the list of games that won't run wonderfully on a good Conroe core chip is probably pretty small (I'm already able to play some games surprisingly more complex with this chip than I expected I would see, and they run pretty smoothly.) Then again, AMD must have something up their sleeves. (For example, I've heard they have a technology in the works to make multicore/smp processors show up as a single core to things so that, in theory, you actually get the combined capabilities of both cores rather than just a small added boost like you currently see. By the time this comes out though, games may finally be as multithreaded as they really should have been for a while now.) AMD just snatched up ATI for some reason, I wonder if they plan to try to integrate some sort of video technology somehow to make them better at gaming? Either way, Conroe will still be ahead for something like DOSBox if they change nothing else I think.

Well I can already play Tomb Raider on my AMD 64 3000+ so the Conroe 6600 should at the very least double my frames seeing as it's vastly more powerful. I'm also looking into oc-ing the system from the start because I heard the new Conroe CPUs OC very well.

There's still room left for optimization in dosbox. maybe tomb raider will be playable even on an old athlon very soon...

Thats what I truly look forward to - when even the lowest end CPU will be able to run Dosbox flawlessly. I wonder how many new users we'll get once they realize that it twas never dosbox's fault to begin with and just their PCs? So many people think speed is an inherit flaw with dosbox......so ignorant.

When you say that Tomb Raider is playable in Dosbox, at which resolution? The 320x200 resolution is playable in many systems, but the 640x480 resolution (non-Glide) is slow even on an Athlon FX-55. Will the Core Duo make it smooth?

The Conroe outperforms the FX-62. But it's hard to say - the 640x480 resolution wasn't even fluent on my P166.

Well, for what it's worth, the Glide wrapper is showing a lot of promise these days. I've been using the non-DOSBox version of the same wrapper for a number of games without noticing any real problems for quite a while (I find that games old enough to actually have an option to use Glide run better in Glide than D3D or OGL and will tend to have a lot of bugs and artifacts on a card using modern D3D/OGL drivers rather than those made for the time, but, toss in a Glide wrapper and run in Glide mode and the game runs smoothly and flawlessly as nearly as I have been able to tell in the games I've played so far.) I no longer have a copy of Tomb Raider and haven't really felt much need to look for one, nor do I have any other games that can use Glide that I know of. Actually, about the only game I have which (probably) doesn't run pretty smoothly on my "4000+" would be MDK (I haven't even tried.)

Anyway, I too dream of the day that even the lowest end processor runs DOSBox smoothly with just about any game. I think the next generation of processors will guarantee all but the toughest games will run smoothly (and even in the case of many of those tough ones, as has been mentioned, a low resolution mode is often available.) It will, of course, take a while until the greater majority are on such processors, but, we are definitely getting closer. Probably by the next generation after this coming one there will be a minimum number of people on processors too slow to get by with a huge number of games at least.

BTW, even in a future when even the low end processors can perform 10x as much as they do today, someone will still find a way to be ignorant, such as having cycles set really low or something.

ReactOS might eventually produce an open source NTVDM.

Nazo wrote:

Then again, AMD must have something up their sleeves. (For example, I've heard they have a technology in the works to make multicore/smp processors show up as a single core to things so that, in theory, you actually get the combined capabilities of both cores rather than just a small added boost like you currently see. By the time this comes out though, games may finally be as multithreaded as they really should have been for a while now.)

Unfortunately, that rumour propagated by The Inquirer turned out to be a hoax:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060713-7263.html

Regards.

Ah crap, I really had my hopes up on that one.

So just what the heck is AMD going to do to stop Intel from putting them back in their place (which, historically, has been eating Intel's dust)? I had high hopes that while it may not be so great for future games, at least things like DOSBox, ffdshow, and older games would benefit from such a technology.

And this is on thread topic btw. I've been an AMD fan for quite a while since the Athlon, and if there's one thing they have been good at over the years, it's raw CPU power. I've been watching my anime in high resolution with a quality software resize in realtime thanks to running my old mobile Barton at 2.5GHz and my current processor at 2.4 or 2.5 (FSB of my "new" board is the limit, it can do 2.5 100% stable.) And then even more on subject, DOSBox in particular definitely requires raw CPU power. If AMD can't compete in this particular area, then people like us who enjoy running things in DOSBox NEED to go Intel. (Not that it makes much difference to me where I'm sitting now. My next upgrade will have to be CPU, motherboard, videocard, AND memory, so going from AMD to Intel is just as hard as upgrading to another AMD for me at this point and a long way away.)

I am pretty sure AMD will counterattack in the near future. That's the way these things go. One just have to be patient. On the other hand, the next hardware upgrade I will make will be a complete system so I wouldn't mind getting a Conroe if it's actually that good.

You bet it is - mid-range Conroe CPU beats AMD top-end CPU and the Conroe only costs a third or less than the FX62. I usually don't go for super-fast CPUs but in this case I believe it's well worth the money. The jump in power is not to be underestimated.