[heevy]

Hello,
currently i am running mDosbox on my old google nexus 5 with ipega extending gamepad and it is pretty cool portable DOS/emulation console. I am looking to buy a tablet(only for gaming…i use ipad for other things) to play more demanding dos/win95 games on bigger screen.

I have already read few threads related to hw and performance( daggerfall performance thread and multithreading thread) and i can clearly see that snapdrogon is not the way to go. What do you recommend ? I saw recommendation of nvidia shield from admin, but what about for example nexus 9 ? It has also tegra k1 chipset on higher frequency, 64-bit processor and “only” 2 cores…in geekbench it beats shield…is there any android dosbox benchmark ? I have found https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxturbo/performance , but this is pretty old. Do you thing that nexus 9 or other tablets(shich one ? 😉 ) can be better than shield for dosbox gaming ?

[Al ex]

Tegra is certainly good. Kirin cpu’s also seem to be doing well. Personally, I can recommend the high-end Exynos chips from Samsung. You can use the Doom Shareware timedemo mentioned on the DTurbo site to get some good comparison scores. This benchmark is some kind of standard btw, not made up by the DTurbo guy, but discussed on the official Dosbox forums much earlier.

Some of my own results (lower is better):

The S7 Edge (Exynos 8890, 2,3 GHz): 670-850 (root + performance governor: 650)
Galaxy Note (Snapdragon 805, 2,7 GHz): 2100-2400 (root + performance governor: 1400)
Galaxy Note 2 (Exynos 4412, 1.6 GHz): 2000 (root + performance governor: 2000, no difference)
Galaxy A5 2017 (Exynos 7870, 1,6 GHz): 2000

As you can see, the Exynos chips always did very well for me. Plus the SD 805 overheated all the time, so I had to use a custom kernel and force it to run as dual core 2,7 / 1,2 GHz instead of 4x 2,7 GHz quad core, to keep performance at a somewhat steady level. And I asked a guy who owned a Snapdragon 820 Galaxy S7, and his scores were abysmal, too. That’s why I would never ever touch a Snapdragon again. Let alone it’s incompatibility with GLTools and Half-Life 2, which I can run flawlessly on my Exynos phone.

tl;dr: get a high-end Exynos (88xx), Tegra, or Kirin chip. Don’t buy a Snapdragon. 🙂

[heevy]

Does anybody has the the results for Nexus 9 and nvidia shield K1 ?

[Al ex]

IIRC, the K1 Shield scores about 1000 realtics. Sometimes lower, sometimes higher, but pretty much close around 1000. Tony (dev) can clear this up, he owns a Shield.

[admin]

Hi,

I own 2 different nvidia devices

1. Nvidia shield portable – device with tegra cpu, in-built gamepad and 5″ display.

It’s older device and I bought it from second hand more then half year ago for 70 euro. This device perfectly emulates all dos and other games, me and my family play on it mostly ps1 and dosbox games. I never tested this device, but is slower then nvidia shield tablet, I think it can score around 1300-1400. In addition I play on it android games like half 1,2 and max payne – at full speed. I recommend this device, but it can’t probably well emulate win9.x games in dosbox. Big advantage is battery with really long time.

2. Nvidia shield tablet (2014)
As far as I know, all nvidia tablets have the same processor. Really fast for emulation, it scores around 1050 – 1100 in dosbox benchmark (personally tested). Big advantage is overclocking option in settings directly supported by Nvidia. Maybe you don’t know, but android devices are usually under-clocked and they can’t use all cpu potential for emulation, to get it usually you must root device and install something like “set cpu” application to change cpu plan. Nvidia offers it in this tablet directly – without loosing warranty. Display is enough (i think) – 7″ not big, not small, perfect for pixelated applications. Battery life is not so big, or cpu is more hungry 🙂 But about power – it emulates everything very well. Another advantage is in-built screen recording (usually you must have rooted device for it). It supports NTFS on sdcard and makes it fast. But like all android systems since kitkat – sdcard is blocked for writing. At the end I rooted this device, I applied sdcard fix and removed root – in shop they can’t notice that. If you don’t want apply sdcard fix then for 16GB internal space is enough if you store iso, bin, cue files on sdcard and install to internal storage – you will not have a problems.

And nvidia addes various own services, like streaming or their hub for gaming where you can find games for free, but mostly are paid.

Another plus is that on google play are exclusive games for nvidia shield tablet :

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.id.doom3bfg&hl=en

Some time I owned nvidia shield TV, but is not worth. I returned it back to shop. It has own very limited android called Android TV. For 200 euro you can get 16GB version without sdcard support what sucks. For 300 euro you can buy 500GB version what might be good, but that system is really clumsy.

Good is that nvidia constantly makes new updates for this tablet. I started with kitkat 4.4, then I got 5.0, 5.1, 6.0 and now I have 7.0. This is unusual

Another thing is (what really surprised me, because in slovakia it is something non-natural) that if something happens with tablet and you need send it to warranty then you can contact nvidia and they pay postage

[heevy]

Thank you a lot to both of you ! I will buy nvidia k1 tablet.

[Al ex]

Good choice. That should be fast enough to play even many Win95 games at decent speed.

[admin]

I found this interesting device too :
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nintendo-nx-mobile-games-machine-powered-by-nvidia-tegra

And my brother bought Honor 9 with Kirin 960 cpu, it scored around 950

[Al ex]

The Nintenso NX will have some closed-source OS. But the Kirin score is really very good.

[Author]

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