Mame Performance + Shaders Sense Check with Intel GPUs

[JackDeth]

Greetings fellow retro fans!

I'm trying Mame on a low power Intel Celeron J4105 [4C/4T no HT] which has a built-in Intel UHD 600 and it works great with Big Box assuming I keep everything stock. When I start to experiment with Shaders is where things start to get a little murky.

Mame version is 0.233 and I've added 'Mame No Nag' 0.250 which works ok. The only thing I had an issue with initially was that the bgfx folder from the 0.233 Mame installation didn't seem to be complete and was missing a few files, so [rightly or wrongly] I downloaded the latest version of Mame and used the bgfx folder from that version. That would at least allow me to enable 'video bgfx' in mame.ini and run a game. Not a huge difference, but games run ok. I also wasn't getting all of the extra shader options when I hit '~' until I installed the 'directx_Jun2010_redist'.

I then tried adjusting the bgfx settings a little, experimenting with things like d3d12, d3d11 and opengl in conjunction with chains such as crt-geom and crt-geom-deluxe but with virtually no success. The Mortal Kombat games are unplayable, very slow, but I can see the GPU being used when I run Task Manager so chances are it's just a limitation of the Intel GPU. I did also try a slightly older Intel 600 driver but this didn't appear to have any effect.

However, if I copy my Launchbox and Mame installations over to a laptop with an i5 6300U [2C/4T and HT enabled] with a built-in Intel HD 520, plus mame.ini set with 'video bgfx' with opengl and crt-geom-deluxe, MK4 runs completely normally and is totally playable, and looks a bit better.

I didn't try enabling HLSL on the i5 as I figured that was too much too big of an ask of the GPU. But I guess I expected a better result from the newer generation J4105 and Intel UHD 600 vs the slightly older i5 and it's Intel HD 520. And with the Mame bgfx docs being called "BGFX Effects for (nearly) Everyone" I was hopeful for a slightly better result. I fully appreciate that a low power J4105 with built-in GPU is in no way comparable to something by nVidia with siginificantly more grunt, but the result vs the i5 confuses me slightly.

Is there something blatantly obvious that I've overlooked, or perhaps somewhere else that I should be looking in terms of settings?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lordmonkus]

You wont be running any shaders on an Intel integrated graphics chip. You will need a GPU of some sort, it doesn't have to be anything super fancy or modern but I would suggest something with 1 gig of gddr5 vram (gddr3 is too slow).

[JackDeth]

Thanks for your reply and your advice. I'll have a look around and see what I can find 😎