Overview of the specs and software resources

In this four page series about bringing my legacy laptop into speed, and how emulators can perform.

I got Samsung Laptop from seven years ago for college, and it came with Windows 7, AMD APU A6-3420m, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD 6520g 512MB, and 500GB Hard Drive storage. Resolution is 1366x768 and the screen seems fine. It is a TN panel that has minor flickering, but you can see the ghost motion when you wave your arms in front of it. Technically, it is a 2011 laptop because AMD’s first gen Llano APU came out in summer of 2011. It is based on K10 from Phenom CPUs and based on Terascale 2 Radeon GPUs from early 6000 series. Since I used it, I always notice the hard drive is pretty slow, but not awful. CPU performance is all right, and GPU performance is pretty decent. I’m going by 2011 perspective, and AMD’s APU always have better GPU performance and drivers than Intel, and the Llano APUs are unlocked, so you can overclock the CPU performance with K10STAT or Fusion, or TurionPowerControl on Linux. I’ll explain the overclocking later.

AMD stopped supporting any GPUs below HD 7700+ cards in August 2015. Beta drivers were only available in February 2016. Finding drivers seems pretty hard to find for Windows 10, besides letting Windows finding it. Since the drivers are four years old and never updates, it gets a bit slower on some graphic APIs on never updates on Windows 10. It does affect the CPU and RAM performance a bit, as the laptop and APU was never made for Windows 10. I see OpenGL performance gets slower, and older DirectX version are affected to an extent. Directx 11 has next to no affect. Windows 10 does some performance degrade, even though the hard drive’s performance can be ignored to see how other parts of the laptop performs. Since it’s an AMD GPU, OpenGL performance is not great, and only having four year life time on drivers seems to show some errors on newer OpenGL programs. Not only that, but I want to use GlideN64 and few other emulators. They don’t perform as great as I wanted to. Crysis runs fine with low setting, and I do get 40fps average. Fortnite, it stutters very badly because the RAM is insufficient. Windows 10 has bloated programs and can take a bit on the memory. I did try de-bloating it, but it did stopped Windows 10 updates from working. It always ask for updates when starting up, and fails when trying to update, even minor updates too. I know the hard drive I had was pretty slow, but it’s overall slow on some programs. Also, unofficial non-GCN drivers exists, but those cause some errors on few apps, and you would have to disable signed-only drivers on Windows 10. However, Windows 10 updates are mandatory, and it will re-enable signed only drivers and will revert your graphic driver to official ones. Unofficial non-GCN drivers are just modified Catalyst/Crimson drivers that uses few new drivers while trying to fix bugs on the latest beta non-GCN drivers.

I wanted to find a way to downgrade back to Windows 7 without losing all the files. I know I can do all the backups, but I heard Microsoft ends support for Windows 7 in January 2020, and it’s really done. Also, A few things I liked from Windows 10 like night light and thin window border are pretty minor, but it still have to use AMD official GPU drivers, and OpenGL won’t perform well as good as you hoped. And no, any terascale GPUs don’t support Vulkan or DX12 at all due to its age.

I was considering Linux to test out how well Mesa Drivers perform. I hear that Open Source drivers for AMD and Intel GPUs are much better than official Windows ones. Even though it won’t have GUI driver control like how Catalyst and Nvidia Control Panel drivers will have, it’s not really a big deal. Starting off with Ubuntu 18.04, and then Xubuntu with XFCE desktop environment to save up RAM and GPU power. I give it a go for testing some OpenGL apps that performs worse on Windows. GlideN64 performs much better than how it was on Windows, whether you use Mupen64Plus or Project64. You can install Gamemode to have your CPU and GPU run at performance mode, and you can add the command line on each app. You can also use multi-threaded OpenGL with MESA_GLTHREAD=True on the command line to get more performance.

Overall, Linux is a better option for my laptop, with better legacy support and maintain driver support. Although official drivers do support OpenGL 4.5, Mesa Drivers can use up to OpenGL 3.3 on my APU currently. It lacks FP64 support that is required for OpenGL 4. The rest of the extensions for r600g driver supports up to 4.5, but the OpenGL drivers are much more stable and fast than official drivers. You can use Radeon Profile app to control power state of the GPU. You can do a bit more options and tweaking on Linux. On Wine, you can use native DirectX 9 API with Mesa Drivers to run games with barely CPU penalty and not use OpenGL wrapper. You can install Minecraft, Steam, Lutris, and a lot of emulators. I even can use a bit more tweaking to get the performance right with some games or emulators with the terminal.

I had to change my storage since my laptop’s hard drive was making noises and gets half a second freeze whenever you hear a click. I changed to SSD 240GB. I know it’s smaller, but I still have plenty of space. It was what I found at my house. The bottleneck of the hard drive was gone ever since and felt much smoother ever since. I did distro hop when experimenting Linux. I go from Ubuntu 18.04 for testing. I jumped to Xubuntu for more efficiency. I then use Pop OS as a permanent thing on the laptop, and moved everything from Windows to Linux. Pop OS was fine, and used KDE, then XFCE. It did use 1GB of RAM by default. When I heard about Manjaro and that it has AUR system and that I can just build programs more easily, I decide to move to Manjaro with XFCE. Manjaro, despite having beginner skills of Linux, I like the fact that AUR builds installs needed dependencies, and build a program that you want to install, and I can easily install emulators that way without manually building ones by downloading source builds and find dependencies you would need. I know distro hopping may not be necessary, but I was experimenting, and that Manjaro seems to treat my laptop well the most. It used around 0.5GB of RAM by default.

The choice of emulators comes down to your CPU performance, and I will pick my choice of an emulator that can run appropriately on my laptop. Next page will cover that and will explain each of every console’s emulators to use. I will also explain some emulators that ran well on Windows for users who wants to use Windows. What it will also cover is the programs I use to get the best out of my laptop.

Next Page about software and emulators.