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Norris2k on 30 April 2014
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bonzobanana said:
ethomaz said:

No.

Emulation like the name says emulates the instructions found in the original CPU... so some instructions can have a similar instruction in the CPU that will emulate the game but others didn't have and you need to waste a lot of CPU instructions/cycles just to emulate one instruction of the original hardware.

So at the end you can have instructions that runs fine and with low CPU cost in the original CPU but that have trouble to run with a lot of CPU use in the CPU used to emulate.

So the emulation will just show the games that have high CPU use to be emulated... it can be low CPU use in the original hardware.

So your theory is that certain games favour certain instructions of the cpu and will have a differnt performance level in emulation? I'm not convinced of that I think the results I have found show games that require more cpu resources are slower in emulation. It's always been stated racing games need less cpu resources as its more about throwing graphics on the screen fast and needed limited AI in the other cars and that seems to be indicated. Factor 5 and Retro studios really push the hardware of gamecube and wii and those are the weakest performing in emulation. Nintendo games typically cartoon graphics without much AI or physics engines etc perform very well. 

The PC is a humble A10 5800k with a HD6670 in dual graphics mode with a quad core cpu at 4ghz. Very cheap PC that cost about £230 to assemble.

It's not a theory, it's a fact and an answer to the question : because the instruction emulation time is totally different depending on the instruction, you can't use emulation to determine which game have high cpu requirements. Some people talk about 3 or 4 instructions, but it can be a lot higher than that, especially if you avoid custom tricks for different games (the fact you have custom development to improve different game proves alone how game behavior can be different). Also, some of the gpu instructions could be (and probably are) emulated on the cpu, leading potentially to an higher cpu use for more gpu intensive games, again depending on the instruction.

Depending of the hardware source and target, emulator implementation, you could find situations where cpu usage are matching very well, but still, by essence, it's not deterministic.