What exactly do you need that many cycles for?

franpa wrote:

If a game demands more then 100k cycles, what kind of CPU would be needed? Would an i7 920 at stock clock speeds be expected to be okay? Or would either an overclock or a purchase of a new CPU like an i7 4770 (which is both faster per clock cycle and by default operates at about 1GHZ faster then an i7 920) be needed for best performance under the described circumstance?

If I remember correctly my i7 920 ran up to somewhere around 80k cycles before it started stuttering. I'm just tested my 4770k for you at 100k with Doom 2 and it works fine. I'm not 100% sure about the old i7 920 it's just what I think I remember. I have all 4 cores OCed to 4Ghz on my 4770k though so Im not sure it stock will do that.

Depends on what game and their demands are. I get over 330k cycles on Quake without stutter (starts stuttering around 510k cycles) on a much slower AMD processor from 2009... and if you're getting stuttering on a core i7 with just 80k cycles it surely definitely isn't your processor causing the stutter

leileilol wrote:

Depends on what game and their demands are. I get over 330k cycles on Quake without stutter (starts stuttering around 510k cycles) on a much slower AMD processor from 2009... and if you're getting stuttering on a core i7 with just 80k cycles it surely definitely isn't your processor causing the stutter

Considering the emulation is extremely dependent on your CPU and no other part of the computer, I am very inclined to think the CPU is what is holding back performance (Especially since I don't use any filters). The games in question would be Milo The Fuel Run and The Settlers 2.

Milo The Fuel Run seems to run best at around 100,000 cycles, however it doesn't run at full speed consistently (The cut scenes however play fine). I think that with The Settlers 2 it starts crapping out at around 120k cycles and also not performing 100% 100% of the time (Cutscenes play fine here, too).

Milo The Fuel Run is definitely the worse performing game of the 2 though with FPS fluctuating a fair bit throughout the levels. The Settlers 2 for the most part runs fine but can on occasion lag a bit.

Settlers 2 run on my i7 920 with my ancient 2009 build from 180-200k cycles at 1024x768 (direct3d output). Movement is perfectly fluid, no stuttering.

I almost never find myself using a fixed cycles count above 10000. If I need anything more than that, I just set it to max. 🤣

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I almost never find myself using a fixed cycles count above 10000. If I need anything more than that, I just set it to max. 🤣

I would too, but bizarrely the Max cycle setting performs dramatically worse than manually setting the cycles, if DOSBox is in focus. If I minimize DOSBox or click on the taskbar/desktop to place it out of focus while using Max Cycles then it tends to perform substantially better then all other configurations... I can probably get a video recording via one of our phones if you'd find it interesting. (This issue only transpires when I enable Animate window Minimize/Maximize operations within Windows Control Panel. If that's disabled then Max Cycles performance is consistently bad regardless of the program being in focus or not.)

And I scale the graphics to my native display resolution while retaining aspect ratio so my video card does play some part in the process, but I still doubt it being the root cause.