Final Fantasy IX Performance - Frame Buffer Effects



Benchmark battle scene


Either fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your preferences), this is where most of the playing time in Final Fantasy games is spent. Welcome to the battle system. Here, we see offscreen drawing, framebuffer uploads and framebuffer effects in full swing. This portion of the game is also rendered at full framerate.


Here, we see the first really large difference of the day. The ATI cards jump to the top of the heap with a very significant lead in performance. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra barely squeaks by the full speed 60 fps limit. Of course, one of my favorite parts about playing this game on an emulator is that I can run at insane framerates and just push the X button a bunch to get through battle scenes faster. That trick actually works really well with all the effects and bells and whistles turned off, but that's neither here nor there.

What's here is the fact that the ATI Radeon based cards just handle the brute force of the battle scenes (which are some of the most complex to emulate in the PSX world) with much more ease than even the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.


CPU speed doesn't quite affect battle system performance as much as the GPU. It is good to see that Intel processors aren't still bottlenecked for this benchmark. The Prescott, Northwood and Newcastle processors all deliver about the same performance here, while the P4 EE and Athlon 64 3400+ lead the way.

Final Fantasy IX Performance - The World Map Final Fantasy IX Performance - 2D Performance
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  • Cygni - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link

    I didnt see this one commin! Cool idea guys. Ive never really seen this done to any extent on a hardware site before.
  • gaidin123 - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link

    ePSXe is pretty much the standard if you are trying to play original Playstation games. Any modern system can run them pretty much full speed but I think this is just yet another piece of a neverending puzzle in comparing different graphics cards. Some people will find data like this important.

    I found ePSXe a while back and replayed Chrono Cross, one of the best RPGs out there imho. ePSXe runs pretty well on my laptop with the Intel 855 onboard graphics and it would be nice to know how the emulator runs on integrated graphics chipsets/laptops (mini-itx boards, onboard Via, Intel, Sis, Ati, nVidia chipsets) in addition to normal cards like the ones tested here.

    Gaidin
  • Souka - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link

    *doh*

    Wonder how many flames this thread will get? :)

  • pxc - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link

    April Fools day came almost a month early this year?
  • apkwebs - Friday, August 24, 2018 - link

    ePSXe for Android is a very modest version of the classic PlayStation One emulator for PC that works perfectly on Android devices. Can I use <a href="https://apkwebs.com/download-epsxe/">ePSXe Apk</a> on my One-plus android phone?
  • apkwebs - Friday, August 24, 2018 - link

    ePSXe for Android is a very modest version of the classic PlayStation One emulator for PC that works perfectly on Android devices. Can I use https://apkwebs.com/download-epsxe on my One-plus android phone?
  • apkwebs - Monday, October 1, 2018 - link

    ePSxE APK : ePSxE is for Android and it’s a simple and modest version of classic of the classic PlayStation 1 and it’s an emulator for PC that just works wonderfully on Android devices. The emulator as the name suggests, does a great job of emulating the task perfectly playing the games of PlayStation one and playing epic titles like Final Fantasy, Tekken 3, Crash bandicoot, and syphon filter, and the biggest one such as Metal Gear solid. You can download the APK Version for free <a href=https://apkwebs.com/download-epsxe/
    >Here</a>.

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