Game Runs Slower on TV than on Monitor - Why?

[Makosuke]

Not even quite sure if this is really a hardware issue, but it's got me confused:

I've been trying to get good ol' MAME (an emulator for a lot of classic arcade games, for those not familiar) running on my TV for the full experience. I have a BTO Radeon 9800 with the TV out adapter (and the latest verison of the ATI control panel installed), so I've got my desktop stretched across my monitor and TV.

The problem I'm having is that while the games will play just fine on my monitor (DVI), if I put the game window over on the TV, it slows down drastically and stutters badly. Move it back, and it plays fine.

It doesn't have to do directly with any 3D acceleration, since it even happens with software-only rendering, but I can't figure out if there's some issue with the funky scanrate of the TV output that confuses the program, if one of the many things to tweak in the ATI control panel for TV output might help, or if it's just a MAME problem with multiple monitors.

Anybody ever tried something like this, and maybe have a suggetstion of what to try or what's going on? DVD video plays just fine on the TV, by the way (great backup when my standard player doesn't like a disc).

 

[7on]

Either Mirror your displays or try setting the TV as the primary display.

I believe 3D acceleration is disabled on 2nd monitors (unless of course commercial games tweak it - THPS3 will play on TV fine - but it disables the primary display too). You might be thinking, well MAME is 2D! Well, that's sorta true. Lots of 2D emulators rely on OpenGL and 3D acceleration to make it run at normal speeds. Nestopia (NES emulator) requires a 800Mhz processor to run at full speed.

But switching your Tv to primary or setting it to mirror will fix this hopefully (it does for me).