Console Emulators: Our Newest Benchmark
by Derek Wilson on March 3, 2004 11:33 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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.
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takuma683 - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
Responding the question of user Shinei:Yes, most Playstation games run at 30 effective fps, some at 15, 10 or even slower, and some do reach 60 (59.94 actually) fps. However, the "fps" displayed on ePSXe is "emulated" fps, that is, TV frames (vertical blanks) per second emulated. Games that run at 30 fps display a frame every two vertical interrupts.
Also a note to all: you don't need an external program to display real fps using ePSXe with Pete's plugins, just turn on the fix "Enable PC fps calculation" and it'll show you the actual fps.
Possessed Freak - Monday, March 8, 2004 - link
DerekWilson -'but this reference is a throwback to one of my favorite cartoon duos of all time ... '
But where are we going to find a duck and a rubber hose at this hour?
But rubber chafes me so.
---
Did I make the right educated guess?
Shinei - Sunday, March 7, 2004 - link
tsee: Aren't PSX games designed to run at 30fps, with the exception of a few later-generation games?tsee - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link
Even when I tried to limit FPS to 59.97 all the games run super fast. When I use the outdated VGS not as many games run but the ones that do run at normal speeds.BigFatCow - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link
we are adding PlayStaion emulationtypo.
BigFatCow - Saturday, March 6, 2004 - link
PeteBernert - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
I want to add a small comment (since my plugins seems to be mentioned in the article ;)) about the "developed on/for ATI cards" confusions: all of my psx gpu plugins (Win D3D/OGL1/OGL2; Linux Mesa/XGL2) were in fact developed on nVidia cards. Starting 1999 on my good ole TNT1 card, later on GF1/GF3/GF4 ones. Yes, spring 2003 I got a R9700Pro (since the first GFFX cards didn't look to promising - hot and noisy - by then), but all major coding (and optimization) work was already finished at this point.So indeed only the pixel shader effects in the OGL2/XGL2 plugins were done with ATI hardware (using no special ATI extensions, though, only the standard ARB ones which are available on nVidia's DX9 cards as well).
Anyway, I am pretty sure that you also can find psx games which will run faster on nVidia cards (for example if many framebuffer reads are needed - even old nVidia cards are still two times faster with such reads than the newest ATI ones), so the spotlight on the two games mentioned in the article is just this: a spotlight. No need for grey hair ;)
ChronoReverse - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
Arguably, you could say that it's pretty boring for the majority of people out there that the A64 plays game X a few frames faster than a P4 (or vice versa).These are the people buying Dells and only caring whether or not the system can play the game.
In any case, I liked this article since I have a passing interest in emulation and emulation is a good way to test both the graphics and cpu subsystems.
DerekWilson - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
#25haha ... yeah, I could see how that would be funny ;-)
exciting from a technological perspective ... really freaking boring from any other perspective :-)
Cybercat - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
"Of course, getting 4 frames per second of something kind of close to what we see on the Game Cube is still pretty exciting."LOL :p Yeah I bet.