How much faster is SSE3 over 2?

[ddrmaniac]

Hey guys, couple of questions. I have a Dell with a P4 1.3ghz SSE2 and 768MB RDRAM. I downloaded the installer torrent and OS X installed first time without a single problem. It's been 3 days and not one crash yet, not even in safari and I'm not using rosetta and still on 10.4.1. However, I just have a couple of questions.

 

Rosetta is kinda slow. It's not bad but runs like maybe an older G3 would or something. Just curious how much faster it runs on a real SSE3 CPU. For people with new processors, like a new P4 with SSE3 and HT, do rosetta Apps run pretty much at their normal speed or can you tell there's a difference? The reason I ask is because I was looking to upgrade my system soon anyway, and OS X seems stable enough to be run as a normal operating system in addition to my PowerBook. The only thing holding me back is the lack of X86 applications as of now, so I just want to know how well rosetta runs on new hardware or if it will still feel as though you're emulating something. Thanks!

[Templeton Peck]

I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein (500MHz G3 min) @ 1024x768x32 with everything else maxed out, except for character textures which I kicked down to high. Genearlly, the gameplay was smooth, but it did stumble occasionally, often for no apparent reason. For example, there's a room towards the end of the first level. If you go inside the room and face the door, the game slows down even if the door is closed. The game can also slow down a bit when there's a lot of enemies. I also tried games with 350MHz(Harry Potter II), 400MHz(Jedii Knight II) and 450MHz(Ghost Recon) requirements, and they were all very playable 100% of the time (Ghost Recon had a texture problem but the speed was good).

 

Based on my experience, I would say Rosetta is generally equal to a 500MHz G3, perhaps higher for non-FPU intensive apps. My machine is a 3Ghz P4 630 (OC'd to 3.3GHz) with HT, 800MHz FSB, and 2MB L2 cache. I'm using the Asrock 775 Dual-915GL mobo which obviously supports QE/CI, and I have 1GB PC-3200.

 

I don't know how Xbench runs in Rosetta, but in my experience there tends to be a disparity between Xbench and the real world, which is why I chose to test games instead.

 

Application performance was another story. Apps with a lot of user interaction and mild to moderate CPU requirements, such as Office and iTunes, run extremely well even with the visualizer @ 1280x1024. All the API calls are handled natively or near natively, so the GUI seems just as responsive as it does in native apps.

 

So that's it. Rosetta is a 500MHz G3, which is like 700MHz in Pentium terms, so it delivers 21% native speed. A far cry from the claimed 80% but not bad for an emulator.