Is 700Mhz enough?

[racketboy]

I'm mostly gonna play 2D games on ePSXe. Mostly RPGs and such. The only 3D games I would play would be like the FF games. That's about it.

Would that make a difference?

 

[Alexvrb]

Remember that the decoder is a big factor in playback performance. That's part of why Divx is fast, you're probably using Divx Networks' codec for playback of Divx files. I don't mean the player, as I really don't notice any difference in performance amongst the common players (including WMP9, assuming they're all using the same external codec/filter).

Anyway, you could try using ffdshow and see if it gives better decoding results than using an xvid-specific binary. It will automatically scale back the post-processing, so the quality may not be as high as it would on a faster CPU. But ~650Mhz should be ok.

 

[racketboy]

well here are some mobile graphics cards I've come across today in my shopping.

Please critique in terms of what I need for ePSXe:

3MB MagicMedia 256ZX

4MB ATI (no actual model name given)

7MB (No brand mentioned)

8MB ATI Mobility M3

ATI Mach64

8MB ATI Mobility M1

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to graphics cards -- especially mobile ones

 

[gameboy900]

All the ATI ones except for the mach64 are just variations of the Rage128 desktop chipset. That was the 3D chipset ATI created before the Radeon. The Mach64 doesn't even have 3D aceleration on it. I believe the first Radeon based mobile chips had a minimum of 16MB of video ram so that can be used as a simple benchmark. All the M rated cards are just the Rage128 stuff. Of course the higher the number the better the speed. Though don't expect anything stellar as the Rage 128 chipset is SLOWER than even the old TNT one from Nvidia. It's basically the slowest 3D accelerator you can get (with the exception of the Intel i720).

 

[Alexvrb]

*shrugs* even a rage 128-based chip would be fine though for PSX and below. I guess it all comes down to just how cheap you are, err, I mean what your budget is

 

[racketboy]

Well all this will be used for is for when I'm on campus when I go back to school. Most of my money goes towards my desktop. This is just kind of an extra mobile machine to replace my older ones.

 

[racketboy]

well I tried playing some DVD rips of 24 (the TV show) that I made on a 400Mhz PII running 2K.

I compressed them a lot. It's a 40 minute show and I made it only 115MB.

I played at full speed and looked ok considering how much I compressed it.

But when I tried watching them fullscreen in Media Player (version that came with 2K), the screen flickers constantly. Not sure what is causing this. Any ideas?

Also, is it harder to play back XviD files that are compressed more or less?

Anyway, if I can get this 400Mhz machine to play this stuff, a PIII laptop should be a problem.

 

[ExCyber]

But when I tried watching them fullscreen in Media Player (version that came with 2K), the screen flickers constantly. Not sure what is causing this. Any ideas?

Make sure you don't have anything running that's "sticky" or "always on top" or whatever.

 

[racketboy]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Feb 13, 2004 @ 09:51 PM

But when I tried watching them fullscreen in Media Player (version that came with 2K), the screen flickers constantly. Not sure what is causing this. Any ideas?

Make sure you don't have anything running that's "sticky" or "always on top" or whatever.

I don't

 

[Alexvrb]

Might be video hardware/driver issues. Try lowering hardware acceleration settings, like overlay.

Also, a smaller video is not like a smaller archive. It isn't "more compressed". A smaller video has a lower bitrate (less data = less visual detail/quality), and is generally easier to decode. Generally videos today are what I would refer to as "over-bitrated", as they like to really bloat things. I mean, 220-240MB for a 23 minute anime?? Even at full DVD resolution I can do way better. Of course I use Divx Pro at max, so its slow to encode (but not decode) and its high quality. Maybe they're just lazy and are upping the bitrate to compensate? "We've got to encode all 300 episodes tonight!"

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that you need to throw a 1000+ kbit video at it and see how it does. Try it with ffdshow if you haven't already, I'd be curious to know if there is a performance difference.

 

[racketboy]

Ok -- I finally got around to trying to run ePSXe on my PII 400 machine.

It was a no-go since the video card doesn't support the right color/resolution to run it.

I'm planning on trying out some xvid rips of different bitrates and see how they do.

Then I'll try some VisualBoy Advance, Gens, and some SNES emulation.