Performance Test Galore: MAME Performance on Three Operating Systems on one Mac Machine Compared!

My new task was to test performance of current MAME binaries on one machine (my iMac 2013) with these three operating systems:

  - MacOS Sierra

  - Ubuntu 16.04

  - Windows 10

Focus of this test: How do BGFX shaders compare to other solutions if you add Artwork? My suspicion has always been that BGFX never can handle Artwork properly.

Result: As soon as you add Artwork, BGFX performance completely goes down - on all three systems! 

This means that if you want to run your games with decent shaders AND decent artwork, you need to head for different shaders, which are

  - MacOS and Linux: OpenGL

  - Windows 10: Direct3D

The extreme results were very surprising for me, so in the end, it was worth the hassle.

Further insights will follow here. For now, these are the detailed performance results (forgive me that I limited each run to 30 seconds ;-).