I've been benchmarking MAME since I got involved with the project in 1997.

My workhorse 2016 i7-6700K OC'ed to 4.5Ghz provided 6 years of service and bench scores. In
early 2022 I upgraded it to an i7-12700K; a nice 6 generation leap that provides about an 80%
uplift.

Each game is run for an emulated 90 seconds (MAME -bench 90) which normally gets to gameplay
in its demos. Some need to be set up beforehand and/or use CHDs; see the legend. Games have
been chosen as historical performance pain points for MAME (analogue sound, DRCs, netlists, etc.)
as it's matured, and others are just favorites. The runs mainly function to show PC power progress
over time, though will often expose performance dips and increases in released code. You'll typically
want a bench result of over 200% to ensure full-speed through actual gameplay.

Numbered tests are run with the official builds from MAMEDEV.org. The nightly runs are my own
builds using a simple 'make -j21 STRIP_SYMBOLS=1'. The results are percentages of 'full speed' in
the emulation.

Keywords: MAME, MAME32, MAME32QA, MAMEUI, MAMEUI64, Benchmarking, Benchmarks, John IV