Window mode SND CPU and FPS indicators...

[bodhi]

Hello,

In Windowed mode, on the bottom right-hand area, there are three indicators: SND, CPU, and FPS. I have vague idea what they indicate but can someone tell me exactly what they mean and how I should read them?

fe: SND's value varies widely from +/- 100%. What is this saying? The fact that it goes into negative has me particularly baffled. Also, CPU, is this the PC load or emulated Amiga's load? Again, FPS, I'm sure it's telling me that the emulated picture is updating at the 50fps (?) but I've had it drop a bit at times. Does that mean that my PC is not powerful enough to run the emulation at the 50fps I requested in WinUAE's settings at that particular moment (maybe when something requiring a lot of processing power is happening within the Amiga emulation) ?

Sorry for being a thicko but, well, I am.

[Toni Wilen]

SND: how far reported audio position (from sound driver) is from optimal/predicted position. Should normally stay inside +-30%. Large positive values don't cause glitches but increase latency (and see FPS), small negative will break sound (buffer underrun)

CPU% is approximately how much host CPU power is in use. Should never go above 100%. (Above 100% = guaranteed sound glitches, FPS going down)

FPS should stay very stable most of the time (+-0.1), larger jumps means something stole time from emulation or sound was so far ahead of predicted position that there was no free sound buffers left (would have resulted in overrun), emulation was paused until there was free buffer space again. (Keeping sound glitch free has priority). Host display mode switches, window resizing etc.. can also cause temporary FPS drop (and SND% jump) which is normal.

[bodhi]

ah, great. Thanks for the explanation, tony! Just been able to optimize my sound quite a bit now that I understand what the SND indicator is actually telling me. Now using DSOUND instead of my card's ASIO drivers (always thought they would be better for <<latency, but apparently not!). Now have very small +/- 8% variation there.

Thanks you!

[rhester72]

What would explain SND going negative and continuing to go negative until about (negative) 40-41% and staying there?

If I run Cinemaware Wings (coincidental test case) with latest beta or release, this happens, and is particularly pronounced with sound autoswitching disabled (just to see if it happens faster, and indeed, it does).

Granted, the machine in question isn't exactly a powerhouse (Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit with 4GB RAM and a Pentium N3530), but CPU percentages tend to stay around 60% on average, and this is a rather light workload to be throwing at it (I think!).

EDIT: Yay, I made it before Toni crystal-balled me! *LOL* The 3D performance of the N3530 is _astoundingly_ bad...switching to DirectDraw worked, but not in full-screen (the machine *tanked* then)...but DD with full window worked like a charm! Stupid "3D" in Intel chipsets... :P

Rodney

[NorthWay]

I'm having a stupid moment here. I just can't figure out why I am getting 30 FPS with my config. I can see the default A500 one doing 50 so there must be something I have messed with.

[Toni Wilen]

I don't see what this has to do with this topic but buy a better pc or don't try something weird like MMU emulation + cycle exact.

[NorthWay]

What the? Did I upload the wrong config. Sigh... Sorry.
I was trying to understand why it was doing 30FPS in PAL, but using >100% CPU was perhaps a hint.

Changing the filters seem to affect the FPS rather a lot. I was looking for something as lightweight as possible that just repeats the pixels 2/3/4 times to increase the size of the output. Most options seem to do some kind of interpolation to it.

[Toni Wilen]

Your config does not have any filters. EDIT: Your problem most likely is DirectDraw. Don't use it. (Misc panel)

"the filters" won't really help, you probably tried software filter and they _are_ slow. Use D3D shader filters.