A number of people have asked me what the minimum system requirements will be in order to run Mega Drive games at full speed in Exodus. That question is a little hard to answer, since the speed at which Exodus is able to run does depend on the code itself that's being emulated. Code with very tight timing requirements is likely to execute slower than code with very simple timing requirements. I also haven't exhaustively tested performance on different hardware platforms or different games. That said, after gathering some feedback, here's my recommendations:
- Windows XP or above
- 4GB+ RAM
- 64-bit quad-core CPU
- 2.8GHz per core minimum. 3.4GHz+ recommended.
A dual-core won't really cut it here. Exodus is heavily threaded, and with the Mega Drive alone, you'll have at least 6 threads actively competing for processor time. Any quad-core will be able to run Exodus, but in order to pull full framerate in most games, you need a very fast processor. I have reports of all tested games running at full speed quite consistently on a Core i7-3770, which has a clock rate of 3.4GHz per core. On an old laptop I've used for a lot of the development on Exodus, with a Core i7-Q820, which has a 1.73GHz clock rate, I seem to average around 60% framerate. If your machine is somewhere between these two configs, expect your framerate to be somewhere between these two points.
