| FishyJoe said: It's unclear whether it's even possible to emulate the GS on the current hardware and how much it will cost. It's considerably more complex to emulate the GS than the EE. |
With enough processing power you can emulate anything ...
As a general guideline (from a few years ago) it took about 8 to 10 times the processing power of a system to fully emulate it in software; with instruction translation you can dramatically reduce this requirement but (unless the architecture is very similar) it tends to be very buggy.
I suspect that the Cell is powerful enough to emulate the EE or GS on its own, but it is not powerful enough to emulate them both together, and Sony may be trying to use the RSX to aid with emulation of the GS but is running into difficulties because they are not similar at all.
Microsoft has an advantage with this because the XBox GPU was accessed through DirectX's hardware abstraction layer, and the XBox 360's GPU is accessed through DirectX's hardware abstraction layer, which means that they can probably interperate the calls through the DirectX API to emulate the GPU even though the processing power difference between the XBox 360 and XBox is (fairly) small.
