Console Emulators: Our Newest Benchmark

Final Words

From our benchmarks, it is obvious that ATI Radeon cards are better suited for emulating the games that we tested under ePSXe and Pete's plugins with the settings we chose. The NVIDIA cards did hold their own and can take care of some tasks very well, so it isn't really fair to say that they aren't good enough to emulate a PlayStation game. We were a bit shocked to see the kind of performance drop from the 5950 Ultra the 5700 Ultra took in some of the tests; we will be looking into the issue further as our experience with emulator benchmarking progresses. There are some settings that can be tweaked in order to get more performance out of the emulator than we did, but we were going beyond simply high quality emulation of the actual PlayStation experience. Of course, if you want to play the Final Fantasy series in all its glory, ATI GPUs are the way to go.

Future graphics and CPU tests here at AnandTech will include a console emulation benchmark. We wanted to introduce the topic with a smaller scope of hardware to take a look at what we might expect to see in future reviews while focusing on the concepts and technology behind the benchmarks. Whether we do the same thing we did here or try something different remains to be seen (and will be based on response and practicality).

As soon as a Game Cube, PlayStation2, or Xbox emulator is able to run retail games, we will be looking to adopt a new emulator, but until then, ePSXe and Pete's plugins will be our standard. We may still end up exploring NES, SNES, or arcade emulators as more specific hardware tests, but we are still trying to finalize our testing methodology. Suggestions are always welcome.

Hopefully, this has been a useful excursion into the unknown of benchmarking. We were certainly surprised to learn about the amount of technology that goes into emulating a PlayStation and we look forward to following further developments in game system emulation. With the addition of this type of benchmark to our future test suites, the emulation community will no longer need to rely on word of mouth and/or guess work in order to determine what kind of hardware they will want for their system. It is our hope that we will start to see ATI, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel take notice of the popularity of console emulators and start lending a little more assistance to the community as well.