Best OS for emulation?

[Borgman2018]

Hi, I have a spare old mini-PC (NUC style, but it's from before the NUC concept even existed) powered by a 1.6GHz AMD E-350 APU, the GPU is a Radeon HD 6310. I intend to use it as an emulation machine for early 3D games (PS1, Saturn, even Dreamcast and Gamecube\Wii if it's powerful enough).

Given these specs, which OS would be best to use? I was oriented towards some linux distribution, maybe even Batocera, but I'm not sure if linux can take full advantage of the GPU.

 

[lucks]

Unfortunately your gpu is not supported by modern linux distros, it is a mess of patches and old packages.

Your only option is windows 10. (Anything older is heavier)

To maximazie performance, your best option is windows 10 ltsc (a debloated win 10 - almost)

You can install the beta amd driver 16.x which is the most recent and quite stable, i had a few issues with openGL with the 15.7 driver.

You must tweak the OS a lot to free up as much resources as you can if you want to push that to its limit.

Amd gpu clock tool 0.9.26 will be your best friend

If this will be a pure emulation machine with no sensible data, you can disable some windows security features to improve your cpu performance. (Your big bottleneck is that cpu)

I don t know if your cpu if affected but you can disable spectre mitigations too.

I can tell you that your gpu is too weak to emulate wii and ps2.
Most games will be unplayable. (Actually it could handle ps2 games but pcsx2 is one of the worst emulators, while play! requires a modern gpu)
Overclock will not help here, the problem is the gpu itself.

 

[Borgman2018]

Thanks for your thorough answer

I can tell you that your gpu is too weak to emulate wii and ps2.
Most games will be unplayable. (Actually it could handle ps2 games but pcsx2 is one of the worst emulators, while play! requires a modern gpu)
Overclock will not help here, the problem is the gpu itself.

I knew about PS2, I was hoping for the Wii, oh well, I'll have to stick to the main PC for that.

 

[Mrpro]

I suggest windows as the best emulation system, also you don't have to have windows you can also do what you are comfortable with.
Hopefully, this helps you.