I'm going to buy a new computer for the purpose of TASing.
- Windows 10 probably
- using TAStudio "heavily" (mostly moving mouse over the piano roll and using hotkeys for crud and others).
- I would want to open multiple instances of BizHawk (probably just 2)
- as many states as I could save
- cores I'm looking to have most time spent: NesHawk, bsnes, gbhawk, z80 based ones, some PCE and PSX, no N64 or AppleII or Wii or DS for example.
Question: what to buy for fastest workflow using bizhawk cores and tastudio?
I would also love to see answers elaborated like what kind of tests or details I should know. Let's say a maximum of 1500 USD but what matters mostly are the parts' features not the actual value of the product in whatever store.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11475
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
All I know is that you need a CPU with faster cores rather than more of them, because bizhawk cannot into parallelism. HDD or SSD probably won't matter much, as we try to make saving tasprojects quicker anyways, but SSD won't hurt. As for RAM, just please get above 4GB :D Videocard will likely not matter if you don't need N64 plugins.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6437
Location: The land down under.
Cheating's allowed right?
Cause if so you can gander at r/PCMasterRace for build examples that they have as a template.
If you want to play the no GPU game. Having a Ryzen 5/7 with VEGA Graphics and you can be set.
And with Vulkan you should be safe and not need a GPU for Dolphin at all with that chip.
Of course if you want to go overkill on CPU side like feos wrote.
A high end Intel i7/9 would guarantee the trick then having an AMD/Nvidia GPU to whichever your choosing on the keep it cheap like an RX580/GTX1060 6gb.
(Honestly, I'd never recommend getting a GTX 1050/3gb/ti. As for alternates at team Red an RX570 won't kill ya.)
For RAM honestly 16GB/32GB since we're entering the age where 8GB will be dying in a few years.
SSD wouldn't hurt and a 4tb HDD for dumping (Dolphin/N64 case) which are under a hundred bucks American.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
First of all thanks everyone for the fast and detailed answers!
Just to be sure, 2 more questions based on answers:
- CPU with highest single core speed. PCMasterRace mostly mentions AMD Ryzens for general and overclocking purposes. Intel also have the K ending ones with higher than usual overclocking purposes (for example the one feos mentiones above this post)
- SSD enough for OS and some tools (web browsers and tools for TASing). --> Can BizHawk gain performance increase from SSD (save states, trace logging to file, movie file saving, dumping files through Lua)?
- DDR4 or above with something 16GB or above. What should I aim for: transfer rate, data rate, bus clock...?
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
By the way, I was wondering if air cooler/water cooler are necessary? (since the emulator is processor heavy).
Even with air cooling a CPU shouldn't get too hot (assuming the fan is a good one). Afaik it's more about noise - a better cooling solution like water cooling allows for lower fan speeds.
feos wrote:
Sure, if he wants to stay below $200. According to this it also has a relatively good price/performance ratio.
The differences can be pretty crazy; for a few percent more in performance you might pay a few hundred dollars more. If you really value performance above all and have the money, just select the highest item on the list that has the newest socket (and isn't a Xeon or requires other exotic hardware).
MESHUGGAH wrote:
CPU with highest single core speed. PCMasterRace mostly mentions AMD Ryzens for general and overclocking purposes. Intel also have the K ending ones with higher than usual overclocking purposes (for example the one feos mentiones above this post)
Overclocking is only useful if you really need any extra percent of performance. You'll then have to deal with higher temperatures, higher running costs (especially if the overclocking disables the automatic downclocking when the CPU is idle), and potentially lower reliability/durability, and probably loss of warranty.
MESHUGGAH wrote:
SSD enough for OS and some tools (web browsers and tools for TASing). --> Can BizHawk gain performance increase from SSD (save states, trace logging to file, movie file saving, dumping files through Lua)?
Aside from making the system feel much snappier, SSDs would help if your HDD is the limiting factor during raw video dumping (e.g. >100 MB/s). Also, moving/copying large files is much faster.
Personally I wouldn't buy a PC or laptop without an SSD any more.
MESHUGGAH wrote:
DDR4 or above with something 16GB or above. What should I aim for: transfer rate, data rate, bus clock...?
Afaik it's not that important to get the fastest available memory. (Programs are more affected by e.g. cache sizes, but then again not all programs are designed to be cache-friendly...) But make sure you get something that is not incompatible with the rest of your hardware.
Even with air cooling a CPU shouldn't get too hot (assuming the fan is a good one). Afaik it's more about noise - a better cooling solution like water cooling allows for lower fan speeds.
I'm a little confused. You mean "Even without air cooling", right?
creaothceann wrote:
Aside from making the system feel much snappier, SSDs would help if your HDD is the limiting factor during raw video dumping (e.g. >100 MB/s). Also, moving/copying large files is much faster.
To get the best possible dumping speed, should I have the emulator in the SSD and dump to the SSD, or the emulator in the SSD and dump to the HDD? I'm asking this because SSD's generally don't have much storage space available, which can become a problem for longer videos.
Even with air cooling a CPU shouldn't get too hot (assuming the fan is a good one). Afaik it's more about noise - a better cooling solution like water cooling allows for lower fan speeds.
I'm a little confused. You mean "Even without air cooling", right?
I mean with air cooling, using a fan. You either have active or passive air cooling, or water cooling. If you don't have a cooler at all then most modern CPUs would overheat shortly after starting to boot the OS... (Even my first CPU, a 486er, had a passive cooler.)
Sonia wrote:
creaothceann wrote:
Aside from making the system feel much snappier, SSDs would help if your HDD is the limiting factor during raw video dumping (e.g. >100 MB/s). Also, moving/copying large files is much faster.
To get the best possible dumping speed, should I have the emulator in the SSD and dump to the SSD, or the emulator in the SSD and dump to the HDD? I'm asking this because SSD's generally don't have much storage space available, which can become a problem for longer videos.
It doesn't matter where the emulator is, as long as you save the video files to the SSD.
Joined: 4/7/2015
Posts: 331
Location: Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
I have a pc with Ryzen 5 and 8Gb RAM and it does the job for BizHawk really well. The air cooler that comes with Ryzen is super silent, and I can work with TAStudio and heavy lua scripts nicely. Also, it was surprisingly cheap here in Brazil.
Games are basically math with a visual representation of this math, that's why I make the scripts, to re-see games as math.
My things:
YouTube, GitHub, Pastebin, Twitter
I'm currently trying to make tests on different PCs to check performance. The suggested hardware factors also written down.
(retested, updated numbers)
Work 1https://imgur.com/1JCga26
CPU 3.33 GHz (2 cores, i5 661, 133 MHz stock bus speed, 3200.1 MHz rated bus speed) https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-661+%40+3.33GHz&id=769
no SSD (7200 RPM SATA) https://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinfo_details.php?lang=en&model=SEAGATE%20ST3500418AS
RAM DDR3 8GB, 666.7 MHz, 9-9-9-24 timing (unknown cache sizes)
Note: default config for both BizHawk and TAStudio, only cores have been selected to use publishable settings.
BizHawk 2.3 without TAStudio but turbo button held down:
NesHawk Donald_Land_Japan.nes 100
BSNES Prince of Persia (Europe).sfc 120~125
A7800Hawk Water Ski (1988) (Froggo).a78 170
Virtual Boyee Teleroboxer (JU) [!].vb 200
ColecoHawk BC's Quest for Tires (1983) (Sierravision) [!].rom 240
BizHawk 2.3 + TAStudio + turbo + 1 button inputting + visible frame range 390~424:
NesHawk Donald_Land_Japan.nes 37~45
A7800Hawk Water Ski (1988) (Froggo).a78 40~50
ColecoHawk BC's Quest for Tires (1983) (Sierravision) [!].rom 30~40
Old laptophttps://imgur.com/aY88P69 (used this for all of my TASes)
CPU 2.00GHz (4 cores, i7 2630QM, 100 MHz stock bus speed)
no SSD (5400 RPM SATA)
RAM DDR3 4GB 665.1 MHz, 9-9-9-24 timing (unknown cache sizes)
Note: tests were done at 80% max performance.
BizHawk 2.3 without TAStudio but turbo button held down:
NesHawk Donald_Land_Japan.nes 50
BSNES Prince of Persia (Europe).sfc 60~70
BizHawk 2.3 + TAStudio + turbo + 1 button inputting + visible frame range 390~424:
NesHawk Donald_Land_Japan.nes 16~22
BSNES Prince of Persia (Europe).sfc 14~22
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
I currently bought a fast, used PC. This post is more of a summary rather than anything else.
- The stats are available from my previous post spreadsheet's 2nd page.
- Currently everything maxed out except CPU compared to the motherboards' properties. Current i5 6400's single thread rating is 1826. My old laptop used for all my TASes had 1312 (note: I mostly used FCEUX).
There's 3 CPU candidate for me:
Socket 1151
Motherboard Model GA-B150M-D3H DDR3
Vendor CPU Model Frequency L3 Cache GPU Frequency Core Name Process Stepping Wattage BCLK
Intel Core i7-7700K 4.20GHz 8MB 350 MHz / 1150 MHz KabyLake 14nm B0 91W 100 F20a (Single thread rating 2,583)
Intel Core i3-7350K 4.20GHz 4MB 350 MHz / 1150 MHz KabyLake 14nm S0 60W 100 F20a (Single thread rating 2,435)
Intel Core i7-6700K 4.00GHz 8MB 350 MHz / 1200 MHz Skylake 14nm R0 91W 100 F2 (Single thread rating 2,353)
(There's 2 other that doesn't ends with K but only 4.00/4.10 GHz)
edit: added single thread ratings.
- Will update test results for 2.3.1 among the different PCs I have access to.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
