Gaming Is AMD really that bad at emulation?

JoostinOnline · Aug 19, 2015

KingBlank said:
So is your reasoning.

LOL! I'm in three different conversations at the moment and things got jumbled up. I mean to say AMD. It was an exaggeration anyway.

goober · Aug 19, 2015

CPUs matter much, much, much more for modern emulation than gpus. Since graphics generally translate fairly painlessly from an emulation perspective there's little use for power there because it's the CPU that's emulating almost everything. If you get a top of the line AMD processor you should be fine with emulation if you're going for middling you're just better off paying the intel tax if emulation is a primary concern because then it does make a difference, in fact it can make a pretty huge difference.

I'd also be wary of AMD's laptop APUs since they're nowhere as good as their desktop ones, and the desktop ones are only as good as a PS3/360 really, Medium settings on most games will net you 30fps at 720p on average. Great if you are fine with a console experience on PC not so great if you want something better. Another problem with AMD everything lately is that they run HOT!!!! compared to Intel and Nvidia which also means that they consume a fair bit more power as well. Intel has also caught up to acceptable results for low level gaming with their integrated graphics so it's not nearly as large of a gap and ultimately you're talking about saving $50 on an equivalent graphics card that would perform at AMD's best APU level.

If you can choose, meaning it's an option to go the AMD route because you just want to save money but don't NEED to save money, AMD is a poor choice almost universally. The main problem with them is their driver support on PC games and it's not about paying devs to use AMD tech versus Nvidia tech it's about them having dedicating teams to help individual games get optimized to their drivers and AMD's hardware and drivers also handle numerous things rather inefficiently which is why, great optimization or not, some games run worse on AMD graphics no matter what. It's just the nature of the hardware design choices and whether the game uses certain shaders and such that AMD isn't particularly great at handling.

Intel and Nvidia are simply better for general all purpose use of anything that is computationally intensive. Period. AMD likes to try different things hoping, sometimes desperately, that it will pay off and really become something but most of the time, despite all the promise and tech speak they just fall flat. I guess if there was an AMD tax they might be able to get ahead again, but yeah people let their love affair with ATI and early 2K AMD cloud their modern take on the real situation. There ARE situations where AMD does trump both Nvidia and Intel but they're extremely, extremely myopic and unless you're spending a lot of time in those very specific areas it may not be worth it. It's why AMD is a great "value" because otherwise they couldn't compete.

All that said, PCSX2 emulation is more demanding on AMD than Dolphin emulation and luckily A LOT of CPUs get benchmarked and shared for PCSX2. So it's pretty easy to see if an AMD processor you're interested in will handle PCSX2 emulation at the rates you will prefer. Just remember to make note of the rendering resolution and tweaks/enhancements being used as well.

tecra_a8 · Aug 19, 2015

stay away from AMD

Originality · Aug 19, 2015

Nobody has mentioned it yet but one of the reasons why Intel CPUs are better than AMD CPUs (clock for clock) is because Intel handles more Instructions per Clock. Per core, Intel CPUs are up to 40% stronger than an equivalent AMD CPU. AMD only balance that out with more physical cores, which gives them an advantage in multi-threaded tasks.

AMD have the edge in the low budget market with their APUs, but for anything that needs a stronger CPU, it's Intel all the way.

jDSX · Aug 19, 2015

Wow great reads
So should I skip on the AMD lappy that I posted and go ahead and look at something else that would run those games I posted plus future proofing for everyday use?

omegasoul6 · Aug 19, 2015

AMD as a company are much better than Intel. However, AMD's CPU architecture is absolute garbage compared to Intel's recent processors, hence why even with higher overall GHz and cores, AMD's best processors (FX series) still only perform about half as good as Intel's recent CPUs.

If using integrated graphics, AMD's APUs are best, however, if using a dedicated graphics card there's no reason to use a AMD processor until AMD Zen comes out in 2016.

tl;dr: Intel > AMD unless using integrated graphics on a laptop.

JoostinOnline · Aug 19, 2015

You should also understand that things are very different when it comes to CPU performance compared to 10 years ago. Back then, clock speed was an enormous factor. You could get a general idea of how powerful any processor was just by looking at the speed, and later, by how many cores it had. Then we hit a sort of power roof. CPU's were drawing too much power, so you couldn't just keep clocking them higher. That's when architecture became the focus, especially on the Intel Core series. Now you can't tell how powerful a CPU is until you look at all the specs.

You should also keep in mind that emulators vary on what they need. Dolphin, as I understand, relies a lot less on your GPU than on your CPU. I was able to run The Last Story (a little slowly) on an old Pentium with integrated graphics. My i5, however, can't run R&C2 on PCSX2 without some serious heavy graphic hacks, which make most textures look like a bunch of garbled pixels. The Wii is a good deal more powerful than the PS2, and yet Wii games way better than PS2 on integrated graphics.

If you end up going with a desktop and don't want to spend much money on a graphics card, I'd recommend the GTX 750 Ti. While definitely not the best card out there, it's amazing relative to its price. Maximum PC was able to get smooth 1080p on modern games when they stuck it in a $400 machine from Best Buy.

vayanui8 · Aug 19, 2015

JoostinOnline said:
You should also understand that things are very different when it comes to CPU performance compared to 10 years ago. Back then, clock speed was an enormous factor. You could get a general idea of how powerful any processor was just by looking at the speed, and later, by how many cores it had. Then we hit a sort of power roof. CPU's were drawing too much power, so you couldn't just keep clocking them higher. That's when architecture became the focus, especially on the Intel Core series. Now you can't tell how powerful a CPU is until you look at all the specs.

You should also keep in mind that emulators vary on what they need. Dolphin, as I understand, relies a lot less on your GPU than on your CPU. I was able to run The Last Story (a little slowly) on an old Pentium with integrated graphics. My i5, however, can't run R&C2 on PCSX2 without some serious heavy graphic hacks, which make most textures look like a bunch of garbled pixels. The Wii is a good deal more powerful than the PS2, and yet Wii games way better than PS2 on integrated graphics.

If you end up going with a desktop and don't want to spend much money on a graphics card, I'd recommend the GTX 750 Ti. While definitely not the best card out there, it's amazing relative to its price. Maximum PC was able to get smooth 1080p on modern games when they stuck it in a $400 machine from Best Buy.

The ratchet and clank games are a bad comparrison. They aren't properly supported by the emulator yet. I believe there was a feature in their graphics engine that pcsx2 cNr emulate yet so they run very poorly.

marcus134 · Aug 19, 2015

TecXero said:
Hmm, maybe, when I'm less tired, I should google around

done that for you

wikipedia: about the Intel c++ compiler
Dailytech: about the Intel antitrust lawsuit

TecXero · Aug 19, 2015

marcus134 said:
done that for you

wikipedia: about the Intel c++ compiler
Dailytech: about the Intel antitrust lawsuit

Thank you. That's definitely unfortunate. Unfortunately, I still have to recommend to customers what will probably give them better performance, even if was Intel essentially gimping the competition on purpose. Though it does look like they're turning around. I'll have to keep up with that.

JoostinOnline · Aug 20, 2015

vayanui8 said:
The ratchet and clank games are a bad comparrison. They aren't properly supported by the emulator yet. I believe there was a feature in their graphics engine that pcsx2 cNr emulate yet so they run very poorly.

I've seen them run smoothly and impressively on Youtube through PCSX2.

Anyway, my point stands. Some emulators are more GPU heavy than others.

irvinscastle · Aug 20, 2015

amd sucks my 6 year old asus can handle ps2 emulation pretty well on intel

Anunnymous · Aug 21, 2015

And my 8 year old HP can handle PS2 emulation pretty well on AMD. Your point is invalid. If you spend enough money, either can do what you want it to do.

Deleted member 357656 · Aug 21, 2015

Serious_Heavy said:
It is not a question of "optimization", it's all about power.
The amount of instructions per cycle (IPC) is tremendous on Intel CPU, but it is a different story on AMD one.

It's not really about GHz and gigabytes, take a look on this website : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

AMD processors boasts high clock rate, but have less power than Intel CPUs.
High single thread performance simply means high performance. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Some infos for those who want to know more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle

For emulation, as goober said, CPUs matters much more than GPUs.

Intel CPUs are powerful and overpriced, but on the other hand, AMD processors are very cheap, it's up to you.

Daggot · Aug 21, 2015

In my experience AMD is fine until you reach the later gens. It has problems with Dolphin and PCSX2 is great until you reach problem titles like the ps2 Ace Combat trilogy

for reference I'm using an fx 6300

Anunnymous · Aug 21, 2015

Serious_Heavy said:
Hell, the first AMD processor on the list is... 270th. (if I'm not mistaken)

In all fairness, the first ~200 are pretty much the same CPU, outrageously priced Xeons that the average consumer would never buy.

StriderVM · Aug 21, 2015

A direct answer = Yes.

But an end all answer you be "depends on what you're using it for".

For example, a lot of "Elite PC gamers" would laugh at you if you get yourself a Fusion processor from AMD, but I have always suggested that to people who have very limited budget and they were suprised at the overall results.

For me balance it all it matters, if you are buying, for example a laptop with the latest generation i7 but only uses the built in GPU in it, I am sure that using a midend/highend fusion processor will net more overall performance due to Fusion processors having a pretty good built in GPU.

Osga21 · Aug 21, 2015

I have an AMD system sporting a fx 6350 and a R9 280 and so far every game I've tried on dolphin has ran just fine. Of course all other emulators for older systems ran well, except for Dreamcast and Sega Saturn, but that is sort of to be expected

Gaming Is AMD really that bad at emulation?

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