What game exactly? What CPU model exactly? The different generations have a pretty wide range of performance differences.
What speed RAM? What speed is it running at?
Are you running dual or single channel on the RAM?
12GB is a strange amount for any setup with an i5 unless you are running 2x4GB sticks and 2x2GB sticks.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-13, 21:10:

What game exactly?

Seems to be related to another thread which was about bottleneck on DOS programming, where he was testing some games that uses an unusual amount of RAM on DOS. Here's an excerpt from that thread.

As DOS is really slow and uncomfortable to work, I am coding and make build for both Ubuntu and DOS using DJGPP. My ubuntu vm ha […]
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As DOS is really slow and uncomfortable to work, I am coding and make build for both Ubuntu and DOS using DJGPP.
My ubuntu vm has 2 cpus and 2GB ram, but anyway, it always uses only 10.2% of ram while running.
According to this percentage, the program must use about 240MB in DOS, am I right?
Though I increase the memory size to 300MB in DOSbox, it crashes all the time, and so real dos does.
Could you kindly explain about this?
Actually, that is a simple 2D graphic game, and it is being developed by allegro.
What I am wondering about is that many DOS games sizes over 100MB and support 3D rendering, they work well in low-spec Dosbox!

I wonder where these "many" DOS games comes from since the actual ones doesn't even use that huge amount of RAM.

DOSBox doesn't support allocating more than 63MB (and frankly it doesn't have to as no commercial dos game then really demanded more than 32MB at most). Also DOS gaming died before 64MB became the norm, as well as before 7th generation CPUs and before Windows 2000's launch 😀

I'm guessing this thread should be in an emulated section.

Q2DOS wants 48 MB

Q2DOS never came out in DOS's heyday. Also the assumptions of memory required comes from the old "disk usage=memory" ignorance. dos games aren't roms with everything loaded at once. The same applies to Windows 3.x stuff (i.e. the Living Books series doesn't require 512mb ram as some claim)

Win98 and WinME support up to 512MB, and this is a supported config by DOSBox-X.

_Rob wrote on 2021-09-18, 12:23:

Win98 and WinME support up to 512MB, and this is a supported config by DOSBox-X.

DOSBox ECE also supports configuring the memory up to 384MB RAM.

The 64MB RAM limitation was only meant for the original DOSBox, not any derivatives that may have different purposes than running DOS games from the era which they were mainstream. The OP didn't even state if he was running the original one or not.

Himem.sys (the XMS manager) from the DOS 5/6 era had a 64MB limit, as well.

Jo22 wrote on 2021-10-10, 14:12:

Himem.sys (the XMS manager) from the DOS 5/6 era had a 64MB limit, as well.

Even older versions of HIMEM.SYS had a 16MB RAM limit. 😉

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-10-10, 15:54:

Jo22 wrote on 2021-10-10, 14:12:

Himem.sys (the XMS manager) from the DOS 5/6 era had a 64MB limit, as well.

Even older versions of HIMEM.SYS had a 16MB RAM limit. 😉

Oh. I didn't know, thanks for telling me. 🙂👍
I assume, that was perhaps related to ISA bus/286 CPU somehow. Would make sense.

John1985 wrote on 2021-09-13, 08:26:

When I run the cross-compiled game in DOSbox, it is really slow and slow..

Some "cross-compiled game" may require beyond emulation speed possible on your computer.
In case for that game are known requirements of real hardware, you may evaluate your computer's emulation performance limits as it's there.

> My game uses 10% of CPU

generally, emulation is much slower than 10%

Windows builds of DOSBox may work faster.
If you want much faster DOS, then you need DOS VM with CPU hardware virtualization as Virtual PC.