Does anyone know what the relative performance is between the two? A reproducible comparison using a demo would be great.
My use case is using DOSBox on Linux running on a very old netbook with a 64-bit Atom processor.
x86_64 in the worst case is 2x slower. It's really a lot. If 5% can make a difference, then 100% can be described as a gap.
With 64-bit dynamic_x86 patch the difference is not (I have not noticed) or is marginal.
Basically at the moment it boils down to DOSBox having two different high-performance cores: dyn_x86 and dynrec.
Dyn_x86 is very fast but currently only supports 32-bit x86.
Dynrec is slower but still much faster than normal/full core, and supports 32/64-bit x86, ARM, MIPS, etc.
Dyn_x86 will probably be updated to support 64-bit in the near future with the patch linked above.
What is normal and dynamic considered to be on 0.74-3? I'm using the DOSBox package provided by my distribution.
"Normal" is always the normal core (interpreter/slow).
"Dynamic" depends if it was compiled with dyn_x86 (32-bit x86 builds only) or dynrec (all other platforms).
