| bonzobanana said:
I understand certain cpu instructions will actually need more more instructions on the host computer to emulate. However unless certain types of games favour some cpu instructions more than others then surely it's still a good indicator. If one game needs only 40% of the cpu resources on a real gamecube but another lets say needs 90% then clearly the game needing 90% is going to be harder to emulate at full speed. So really then the people who are saying 'no' are claiming its mere coincidence that the games of the developers that are known to push hardware to the limit are slower when emulated compared to other more simplistic games because that is the reality of Dolphin emulation. |
I don't think you get what I was talking about ... I know that instruction set usage will bias the results but if you've been using emulators such as PCSX2 you'll notice that in the graphics plugin that there is an option to emulate the graphics synthesizer on a CPU. What this means is that some games need to be rendered in software mode due to the limitations of the graphics pipeline or the hardware constraints. This basically means is that it'll give the wrong impression that game A is very CPU intensive when it is infact not true because most of the work was demanded by the component GPU but it had to be emulated on the CPU.
Then you have to start considering that some consoles have integrated heterogeneous esque processing models. I would argue that the emotion engine and the cell were philosophical precursors to AMD's APUs. This is one of the reasons why the PS2 and the PS3 were very hard to program for. Most of the power that came from the PS2 was not from the MIPS core but rather from the DSPs known to be the PS2's vector units. The vector units found on the PS2 are very similar to the vertex shaders found on the GPUs. In a sense this meant that almost none of the games on the PS2 were very CPU heavy from the perspective of PC gaming components seeing as how most games had to make use of the PS2's GS and VUs to get the most out of the PS2. It isn't fair to say that the VUs could be just seen as another general purpose processor when it had more in common with a vertex shader. All of this had meant that you cannot gauge which games were CPU heavy because emulation in general requires alot of flexibility which had meant that traditional rendering tasks such as transform and lighting on the PS2 had to be emulated on the CPU despite the fact that they were handled by GPUs on the PC space.
All of this gives the PS2 a totally wrong impression that it was a CPU beast.
