This observation, while referring to the other branches of DOSBox, is primarily about SVN so bear with me.

For a while now I have been building my own SVN in a MacOS environment, which gives me a binary that achieves very fast performance. On average, I see scores of about 1500-1750 on Chris's 3D benchmark and Quake low res frame rates of around 300-400+ range. It is great for running Windows in DOSBox, as I can achieve smooth results when running 3DFX compatible games in software mode. None of this matters for DOS games, of course.

I recently shifted to Windows and I was a bit surprised about the results. Across SVN (my own build), ECE, Staging and DOSBox-X (whether SDL1/2 etc.) I can never achieve benchmarks higher than about 830-1000 in Chris's 3d benchmark and about 90-240 frames in the Quake test. All of the branches are slower, and equally so. This is when using the various dynamic cores specific to each branch. This translates to much slower performance in Windows 9x, so games that were playable in my Mac build are not so much now. This is the opposite of what I expected when switching to Windows. I understand that build environment and variables can affect things, but I did not expect it to manifest such a difference, across all DOSBox variants.

Back to my core observation (pardon the pun), but is there a way to coax better performance out of the dynamic core when building my own SVN in Windows? Before switching my Windows emulation attentions to 86Box, I wanted to raise this issue. I find it interesting and a little ironic that the Mac gives me far superior results. This is all on the same machine by the way, running a dual-boot Mac with Windows 11, so difference of hardware is not applicable. If something is throttling this in Windows that does not affect the Mac, I have no idea what it is.