[maverick] snes9x-gtk exhibits very high cpu usage and possible slowdown

[Michael DePaulo]

snes9x-gtk exhibits very high cpu usage all the time on my quad-core core i5 system with a regular clock speed of 2.67 ghz. My system seems to only run at 1.2 ghz during these benchmarks regularly, but it is still very fast. I will create another bug report for the cpu frequency scaling issue.

By default it runs in software rendering mode rather than opengl mode.

For these tests, I used the free homebrew game called N-Warp Daisakusen (1.1) You can find it here:
http://gra.dforce3000.de/
I let it sit at the title screen during these benchmarks.

When in software rendering mode and running full screen (1920x1200) or in a nearly full screen window, it uses up 100% cpu core usage (split between snes9x-gtk and Xorg processes) according to gnome-system-monitor. The game runs slowly with garbled sound.

When in opengl rendering mode and running in a nearly full screen window (1920x1200,) the total CPU usage between the two processes is about 32%.

When in software rendering mode and running in the default (tiny) window, the total CPU usage between the two processes is about 40%.

In comparison, snes9x under windows 7 x64 has about 7% cpu usage in the default tiny window using directdraw (2d acceleration only.)

I've tried deleting the config file (~/.snes9x/snes9x.xml) to make sure there are no leftover non-default settings.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: snes9x-gtk 1:1.52-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-20.29-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-20-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Sep 14 02:46:17 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Beta amd64 (20100901.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: snes9x

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

How high is the CPU usage if you use XVideo instead of OpenGL?