It seems that one of the major drawbacks of current MacOS MAME is the lack of a Dynamic Recompiler (dynarec), which is only available for Intel64 builds. Modern Arcades can crawl even on very powerful Silicon Macs if the games relies on a dynarec. This is where an Intel build comes to the rescue.
Comparison between ARM/Silicon and Intel64 Build |
What this comparison tells you:
- The ARM build fares much better in old school gaming that don't require a dynarec.
- The Metal backend seems to catch up with the OpenGL backend, which is still faster.
- The performance gains with an Intel64 build in games that require a dynarec are dramatic.