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It's unbelievable that over the whole course of PS3's lifespan we've gone from "we will never be able to emulate this at full speed, the hardware is too slow an

It's unbelievable that over the whole course of PS3's lifespan we've gone from "we will never be able to emulate this at full speed, the hardware is too slow and the Cell architecture too alien" to "why is PS3 emulation so fast, optimizations explained". I've been loosely tracking various emulators' progress and it's hats off with regards to the ingenuity behind all of the mechanisms that make it possible to emulate things fast enough.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
To be fair PC CPUs and GPUs have evolved leaps and bounds form the beginning of PS3 emulation till today.
deaddodo 1y ago
I don't think anyone with knowledge of emulation (from a research and development side) would say it's impossible. The Cell is a standard PPC core with some well-documented[1] coprocessors. A more realistic response would be: "computing hardware would not be powerful enough to emulate the PS3 in it's lifetime". We're now two decades out from it's release, and a decade out from it's final phase-out, so it seems that was a fair assessment. 1 - https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/arch/SPU_ISA_v1.2_27Jan2007_pub.pdf https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a...
magic_hamster 1y ago
Sony learned their lesson from what happened with the PS1, where commercial emulators like Bleem became available during the product's lifetime. It was probably not a huge deal in terms of lost sales, but Sony really didn't like this, as evident by their lawsuit (which also failed). The PS2 with its Emotion engine was a huge leap which was pretty hard to emulate for a while. And the PS3 was even harder. Yes the developers hated the Cell architecture, but overall, Sony managed to create a pretty good system which spawned incredible games, while also being so hard to emulate that it took over a decade to reach a point where it's done properly, and almost 20 years to reach a point where it's considered really fast. Compare this to the Switch, which was being emulated pretty well from the get go. This allowed some people to just make do with an emulator instead of buying the console (and the games). Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices.
- glimshe 1y ago
  Sony didn't create the cell architecture to prevent efficient emulation. At the time, manufacturers tried to get as much performance as possible from the manufacturing dollar under the assumption that developers would optimize their games for the machine. It was actually a partial failure, as few third party titles made full use of the architecture.
  - whizzter 1y ago
    Kinda, in so many respects the PS3 SPU's that many hated was just taking the PS2 VU's to the next level as the programming model was very similar(shuffle blocks of data via DMA to fast vector units). As a former PS2 developer I mostly thought "cool, VU's with more memory". Few games really utilized the PS2 to it's fullest either (there's an port of GTA3 and GTA:VC to the older Dreamcast that's coming along very well). The thing that really bit Sony here for the PS3 was that many PS2 titles (The PS2 GTA games being the prime example!) used the Renderware engine (a few others were available but it was the most popular afaik), so the complexity of the PS2 never really hit developers who were making games just below the absolute top tier. When EA bought up Renderware slightly before the PS3 release, they closed off sales while honoring existing sales only so the most used cross platform engine was suddenly off limits to most third parties for the PS3 (Iirc is why Rockstar released that ping-pong game as an engine test before GTA4 and 5). And the perceptions about third party engines also took a hit so not only was the most popular engine closed off, bigger developers were also became wary of relying on third party engines at all (during the PS3 period) until Unity later took off from indie usage.
    - pipes 1y ago
      That is really interesting thanks. I always wondered what happened to renderware or why I stopped seeing it after the PS2.
- rounce 1y ago
  > Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices. Roughly 30 years later and N64 emulation is not fully solved.
whizzter 1y ago
Back in those days we didn't have that many cores,etc so the raw computation power of the PS3 was an issue in itself and the SPU was a kind of middle-ground between shaders and CPU's so you probably had to use a regular CPU to emulate it. We have multicore machines with far more cores today so we can match the computation unit count and performance. The other part was that older consoles (8 and 16 bit era) really needed a lot of cycle-exact emulation to not fail and that requires an order of magnitude faster CPU's to manage emulating it properly and with CPU's hitting the Ghz limits around the same time we thought it'd be impossible to do that level of cycle-exactness needed. Luckily though, because the PS3 needed optimal multi-core programming and the way to achieve the maximum throughput for that was to use DMA channels to shuffle data between CPU/SPU parts, emulator authors can probably use them as choke-points to handle emulation on a slightly more high level and avoid trying to manage cycle-exact timings.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  The nice thing about more recent architectures is that no one (including the original authors) can rely on cycle-exactness because of the basically unpredictable effects of caches and speculative execution and bus contention and (...). Most of these, as a big exception, do not apply to the Cell running code on data in its local memory, but fortunately, it's different as seen from other system components, as you say.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

To be fair PC CPUs and GPUs have evolved leaps and bounds form the beginning of PS3 emulation till today.

deaddodo 1y ago

I don't think anyone with knowledge of emulation (from a research and development side) would say it's impossible. The Cell is a standard PPC core with some well-documented[1] coprocessors. A more realistic response would be: "computing hardware would not be powerful enough to emulate the PS3 in it's lifetime". We're now two decades out from it's release, and a decade out from it's final phase-out, so it seems that was a fair assessment. 1 - https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/arch/SPU_ISA_v1.2_27Jan2007_pub.pdf https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a...

magic_hamster 1y ago

Sony learned their lesson from what happened with the PS1, where commercial emulators like Bleem became available during the product's lifetime. It was probably not a huge deal in terms of lost sales, but Sony really didn't like this, as evident by their lawsuit (which also failed). The PS2 with its Emotion engine was a huge leap which was pretty hard to emulate for a while. And the PS3 was even harder. Yes the developers hated the Cell architecture, but overall, Sony managed to create a pretty good system which spawned incredible games, while also being so hard to emulate that it took over a decade to reach a point where it's done properly, and almost 20 years to reach a point where it's considered really fast. Compare this to the Switch, which was being emulated pretty well from the get go. This allowed some people to just make do with an emulator instead of buying the console (and the games). Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices.

glimshe 1y ago
Sony didn't create the cell architecture to prevent efficient emulation. At the time, manufacturers tried to get as much performance as possible from the manufacturing dollar under the assumption that developers would optimize their games for the machine. It was actually a partial failure, as few third party titles made full use of the architecture.
- whizzter 1y ago
  Kinda, in so many respects the PS3 SPU's that many hated was just taking the PS2 VU's to the next level as the programming model was very similar(shuffle blocks of data via DMA to fast vector units). As a former PS2 developer I mostly thought "cool, VU's with more memory". Few games really utilized the PS2 to it's fullest either (there's an port of GTA3 and GTA:VC to the older Dreamcast that's coming along very well). The thing that really bit Sony here for the PS3 was that many PS2 titles (The PS2 GTA games being the prime example!) used the Renderware engine (a few others were available but it was the most popular afaik), so the complexity of the PS2 never really hit developers who were making games just below the absolute top tier. When EA bought up Renderware slightly before the PS3 release, they closed off sales while honoring existing sales only so the most used cross platform engine was suddenly off limits to most third parties for the PS3 (Iirc is why Rockstar released that ping-pong game as an engine test before GTA4 and 5). And the perceptions about third party engines also took a hit so not only was the most popular engine closed off, bigger developers were also became wary of relying on third party engines at all (during the PS3 period) until Unity later took off from indie usage.
  - pipes 1y ago
    That is really interesting thanks. I always wondered what happened to renderware or why I stopped seeing it after the PS2.
rounce 1y ago
> Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices. Roughly 30 years later and N64 emulation is not fully solved.

whizzter 1y ago

Back in those days we didn't have that many cores,etc so the raw computation power of the PS3 was an issue in itself and the SPU was a kind of middle-ground between shaders and CPU's so you probably had to use a regular CPU to emulate it. We have multicore machines with far more cores today so we can match the computation unit count and performance. The other part was that older consoles (8 and 16 bit era) really needed a lot of cycle-exact emulation to not fail and that requires an order of magnitude faster CPU's to manage emulating it properly and with CPU's hitting the Ghz limits around the same time we thought it'd be impossible to do that level of cycle-exactness needed. Luckily though, because the PS3 needed optimal multi-core programming and the way to achieve the maximum throughput for that was to use DMA channels to shuffle data between CPU/SPU parts, emulator authors can probably use them as choke-points to handle emulation on a slightly more high level and avoid trying to manage cycle-exact timings.

ahartmetz 1y ago
The nice thing about more recent architectures is that no one (including the original authors) can rely on cycle-exactness because of the basically unpredictable effects of caches and speculative execution and bus contention and (...). Most of these, as a big exception, do not apply to the Cell running code on data in its local memory, but fortunately, it's different as seen from other system components, as you say.