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I doubt this will run well on anything but the latest high base clock PC's. I have a 2.2 Ghz Sandy Bridge laptop, with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 Ghz, but Turbo Boos
by higherpurpose 13y ago
I doubt this will run well on anything but the latest high base clock PC's. I have a 2.2 Ghz Sandy Bridge laptop, with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 Ghz, but Turbo Boost is mainly marketing scam by Intel, so it will run as if it's 2.2 Ghz. Plus Haswell only has a ~15 percent IPC improvement over SNB. With the PS2 emulator I can't even get 60 fps for most games.
- noir_lord 13y agoDoes it matter though, this is an elegant hack in the true sense of the word. The cell processors architecture pretty much rules out high fidelity emulation directly on an x86 chip any time soon. Not all hacks have to be useful (even for a given value of useful).
- juliangoldsmith 13y agoI disagree. High-speed emulation of the processor would be possible using dynamic recompilation, a la QEmu. Someone would just have to write the code to do it.
- gambiting 13y agoI disagree. Dynamic recompilation wouldn't help with the fact that x86 just doesn't have an equivalent of SPUs. They can be emulated, but they will be nowhere near as fast as the real thing. You can reliably emulate the PPU but that's about it. I've programmed for the PS3 and the architecture is so different to x86 that any emulation would have to somehow make up for the hardware that doesn't exist in x86. Early games for the PS3 didn't even use the SPUs, or barely used them, running mostly on the PPU, and those games should run fairly decently fairly soon. But latest games like The Last Of Us, where the SPUs have been pushed to the limit? I wouldn't count on that being emulated anytime soon.
- noir_lord 13y agoIt's not "just" a software problem. The SPU's are a fundamentally different architecture to an x86 been something akin to a graphics card, heavily optimised for a very particular kind of floating point calculations (somewhat similar to SSE but much more task focused). A more likely approach is to use something like CUDA/OpenCL but again while closer in architecture the SPU's are incredibly optimised for one thing.
- cc439 13y agoI think the best chance for emulating the SPUs would be with an Intel processor equipped with Iris Pro and the shared L4 cache. The latency and memory sharing issues involved with using a dedicated GPU would impose a huge bottleneck and the AMD APUs are just so weak in IPC terms.
- K0nserv 13y agoAs it stands right now the chance of seeing a playable PS3 emulator is much less than the chance of seeing a playable PS4 emulator. This is of course due to the x86 processor on PS4 EDIT: DCKing corrected me on this I erroneously assumed that the CPU architecture was the main hurdle. Turns out the GPU is a much bigger problem. The more you know, thanks DCKing.
- DCKing 13y agoThis is not true. The great complexity of modern GPUs is a much larger problem generally than emulating a CPU. Furthermore, the previous x86-equipped console, the original Xbox, never saw any decent progress in emulation whereas its far more exotic competitors have really good emulators. That's not to say the exotic Cell architecture is not a major problem for PS3 emulation. It is. But having an x86 CPU does not seem to increase the emulatability of a console at all.
- nathanb 13y agoDo you think this is because of difficulty in emulation or because the X-Box was so easy to hack? It was not super expensive to buy a used X-Box and mod it even back when new games were coming out for it, so maybe it just didn't seem like a worthwhile investment to spend time writing an emulator?
- Springtime 13y agoI'd recommend reading this post [1] by the dev of an existing Xbox emulator. It's a summary of the issues inherent to the emulation of the original Xbox, highlighting some major hurdles and technical difficulties that would have to be overcome. [1] http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=48088464&postcount=26 http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=48088464&postcoun...
- herokusaki 13y agoWhy doesn't the developer's post address the possibility of visualizing the CPU rather than emulating it?
- Torn 13y agoIt won't run well, period. It's very early stages and isn't even handling textures properly, let alone running games smoothly.
- supergauntlet 13y agointeresting tidbit - if you search 'turbo boost is a marketing scam' on google your comment is the first result.