This table is great and I think it really helps estimating the results of these improvements.SuperBabyHix wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 3:33 am The DX vs SX differentiation really is not significant for games. Off the top of my head I can think of maybe three games (prior to Quake coming out in 1996) that made use for a math co-processor (Falcon 3.0, MS Flight Sim 5, and I believe Sim City.) The Doom engine, for example, used integer math exclusively.
You can check against the very massive Phils VGA Benchmark Database to see this core is performing around the 486 SX/DX 33 level.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
This new Core version will fall squarely on 486DX33 territory (comparing PCPBench FPS, Doom FPS and Realticks scores), an AMAZING improvement!
I do remember them, I was quite active on the PC during the 386sx to 486DX4 era, and I am quite familiar with their performance. Great timesdshadoff wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 5:29 am Strictly speaking, the core is similar or slower than a 386 running at the same clock speed (note that the clock speed of this core is 90MHz). However, I believe that it may implement the new 486 instructions (minus the coprocessor). You may not remember 386DX-40 or 486SX2/50, but they existed and would be suitable comparisons for performance (and would likely outmatch the core in its current state). But honestly, it doesn't much matter since there were so many other factors speeding up or slowing down machines of that era.
I think it is clear that the ao486 core is far from optimized, one of the main reasons we cannot compare Mhz to Mhz. That's why we need to look at benchmark scores, to give us a ballpark performance that you can compare to real hardware.
It is obvious that the core would benefit from having SVGA at some point, but for now I'd rather see it be more accurate with better performance and stability, including less bugs with EMM (there is still something wonky with it's memory management).dshadoff wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 5:29 am I see the cache-related performance increases as releasing the original potential of the core, but I see other people in this thread wishing for more and more CPU-thirsty games, which eventually will be beyond the reach of this core.
I think it might be interesting to send the core into a new direction like to pursue the NEC PC-98 series of PC-like computers, which might actually be easier than reworking the CPU's pipelining and execution units.
Would love to see a NEC PC-98 and/or Tandy cores (branched from AO486), but I see them more as separate cores because they are targeting a more specific kind of hardware.