VOGONS


First post, by ProDigit

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I've got a few games that kind of stutter (especially audio and panning) in DOSBox.
I always attributed it to crappy hardware. I ran them on Intel Atom Netbooks, and now nearly 10 year old Celeron laptops.
But recently I've upgraded to a more modern i3 with iris XE graphics. While modest, it has 8 threads (vs 2C/4T on the best retro laptop I had, the Celeron), running at 3.7Ghz (vs 2Ghz on the Celeron), plays back DX11/12 games at 1080p at about the same fps as the Celeron ran 480-720p.

So, while not a gaming device, it is significantly better, and yet, every time I run DOS games that make use of more than 640x480 pix resolutions, DOSBox falls on it's face.

While I can run most games at 320x240 or 640x480 pixels native resolution just fine, even on my Atom netbooks, the moment I do 2x to 4x the resolution, DOSBox has difficulty with displaying panning backgrounds, videos, low FPS, screen tearing, and crackling or stuttering audio.

I've tried adjusting the cycles to no avail. I don't think my IGP ever went beyond 400Mhz during game play (300Mhz idle, 1225Mhz peak).
Neither do I see a constant load on the CPU. Seems to hover around 75% peak (estimated).

So I'm having more than enough CPU and GPU cores available to do the processing.
On other game console emulators, even the Celeron has no problem 4x-ing the resolution, bicubic filtering, 16x anisotropic filtering, etc..; so now I presume it's an inefficient software design.?