Mame™ Raspberry Pi 4 benchmarks

The main target of these benchmarks right now is to track performance over time in Mame version. I'm not mad enough to run Mame on a Raspberry Pi, but understand why others do it and want to keep a realistic dataset about how feasible it is.

The idea for these benchmarks comes from ChoccyHobNob who made runs on Raspberry Pi 1, 2 and 3 and can be found in the Wayback Machine. The benchmarks on this page used exactly the same configuration where possible so that they are comparable, and all the same games have been run. Where possible the games included in john_iv's continuously updated benchmark run on modern PCs have also been included in this benchmark, but a few games are so slow that they are unfeasible to run on the current generation of RPi.

Benchmarking environment

• Raspberry Pi 4 rev 1, 2G RAM variant
• The CPU is equipped with a heatsink and fan
• Overclocked from 1.5GHz to 1.75GHz. (2GHz is also doable, but not everyone seems to win the silicon lottery that allows for that)
• CPU throttling is monitored and noted in the benchmark table (orange). Those will eventually be re-run.
• /boot/config.txt has this added to the top-level:

  # Mame Benchmark mode (640x480), force HDMI even with missing monitor /zino
  hdmi_group=2
  hdmi_mode=4
  hdmi_drive=2
  hdmi_force_hotplug=1
  mame.ini halves sound sampling frequency (probably does very little, but matches ChoccyHobNob's runs):
  #
  # CORE SOUND OPTIONS
  #
  samplerate    22050
  mame.ini turns off artwork where possible:
  #
  # CORE ARTWORK OPTIONS
  #
  artwork_crop  0
  use_backdrops 0
  use_overlays  0
  use_bezels    0
  use_cpanels   0
  use_marquees  0
  
  Exact setup can be found in the github repo
  

Benchmarks

• Raspberry Pi 4 1.75GHz OC (-bench 90 runs) These runs the builtin benchmark, which does not try to output video or audio
• Raspberry Pi 4 1.75GHz OC (-str 90 -nothrottle runs) These runs Mame as normal, with video and audio and are closer to what can be expected when playiung the game

Preliminary Intel benchmarks

• Per game comparisons of compiler options
• gcc8 -O3 (default) All games in the same graph for one optimization type, select the ones you want
• gcc8 -O4 -march=native -fomit-frame-pointer All games in the same graph for one optimization type, select the ones you want
• gcc8 -Os All games in the same graph for one optimization type, select the ones you want