Emulation of 5th gen and older consoles - how much GPU is enough?

[candre23]

I'm building a bartop cab to run arcade and console emulators.  Bought a nice new G1610 ivy bridge celeron and a microATX board to go with it, but debating on video cards.  I know the integrated intel HD GPU is garbage for modern games, but will it be sufficient for 5th gen (PSX, Saturn, N64, Jaguar) and older consoles?  If I'll need to go dedicated, how much GPU am I going to need?

[RyoriNoTetsujin]

Well, I think the question here is do you have enough CPU oomph to make the iGPU the bottleneck?  Unfortunately, folks here don't generally deal with the range of chip you have. Most folks here use either salvaged CPUs from legacy systems (P4s, C2D, C2Q, various AMD) ... or go all the way for the top-end Core i5s and i7s. 

That said, the HD2500 iGPU in your Ivy Bridge Cele is at least as good as-- if not better than-- the HD3000 in my Sandy i5-2500K, which has no issues with anything in that 5th Console Gen range. But like I said, I don't know how much of that has to do with the CPU vis a vis the GPU. Each of those emulators is different, too, so that's going to be a factor.

Test it out, and please be sure to come back and note how it went! If nothing else, I imagine that would make a great HTPC processor.

[candre23]

Thanks for the input.  I think I'll do just that - test it out and see how it does.  If I have to add a dedicated GPU later, then so be it.  If not, then I save some money.

I went with the celeron because it seemed like the best bang for the buck.  Dual core 3.6GHz ivy bridge for less than $50 is a pretty sweet deal.  Sure, I don't get hyperthreading or tons of cache, but I don't think those would be much help for emulation anyway.  As I understand it, most emulators don't scale well (if at all) with multi-core/thread processors, so this should be darn near as capable as an i5 or i7 at the same frequency.  Got the processor, MB, 32GB SSD, 4GB RAM, and a PSU for $200 shipped.

[RyoriNoTetsujin]

Dual core 3.6GHz ivy bridge

Actually 2.6Ghz. (I'm sure you know that, I'm only saying it in case someone else comes along and reads the thread.)

That said...

Got the processor, MB, 32GB SSD, 4GB RAM, and a PSU for $200 shipped.

That's pretty sweet! Should run just about everything 2D you could want (4th-gen and earlier consoles, MAME non-3d games, etc.)  I'm REALLY curious now to see how you fare with the PSX-era systems!  You might even be able to get away with some Dreamcast stuff.

Interesting! Best of luck! 

[candre23]

Whoops, typo.  Yeah, 2.6GHz, which is still pretty darn good for the price.

I'm sure PSX will be fine (runs flawlessly on a P4), but I will also be interested to see if it can handle N64 and saturn at full speed.  Maybe even dreamcast and PSP to some extent?  We'll see.

[kahlid74]

The BEEEEESSSS.  Damn your avatar picture.


So the core i5 is really the go to guy if you want to make sure you never experience any issues.  High level what you have should be good to go but I might look towards grabbing a cheap graphics card too, like a GT620 or something along those lines.

[05SRT4]

I have an Q6600 chip and a Radeon HD 4670 and those emulators run flawlessly on my machine. I remember my P4 (Basic Dell PC) ran N64 games fine.

[sandheaver]

Emulation happens in the CPU of your machine, not the GPU.  Yes, the games are being displayed, but that doesn't mean the emulation is happening in the GPU.  I believe HLSL effects are GPU bound, though, so if you're going to enable the NTSC features of HLSL then you would probably want to invest in a beefy GPU.

This is for MAME/MESS, anyway.  I'm sure there are probably some high-level emulators that render via the GPU, but MAME & MESS don't, at least not as a natively written game would.

[kahlid74]

Emulation happens in the CPU of your machine, not the GPU.  Yes, the games are being displayed, but that doesn't mean the emulation is happening in the GPU.  I believe HLSL effects are GPU bound, though, so if you're going to enable the NTSC features of HLSL then you would probably want to invest in a beefy GPU.

This is for MAME/MESS, anyway.  I'm sure there are probably some high-level emulators that render via the GPU, but MAME & MESS don't, at least not as a natively written game would.

Correct, for MAME/MESS it is CPU but for 5th gen emulators, which is the subject of his post, GPU is relevant.  GPU isn't more relevant than CPU but it is Still relevant.   You will see a noticeable different in Goldeneye on N64 emulators with a Geforce GT620 than Intel HD4000.

[sandheaver]

Correct, for MAME/MESS it is CPU but for 5th gen emulators, which is the subject of his post, GPU is relevant.  GPU isn't more relevant than CPU but it is Still relevant.   You will see a noticeable different in Goldeneye on N64 emulators with a Geforce GT620 than Intel HD4000.

Ah, I misread.  I thought he meant emulation of 5th generation games, not 5 gen emulators.  Maybe I'm still reading it wrong.  Probably stems from the fact that I dunno what generation the 5th generation is, or if MESS supports any of them.