I've seen this question posted elsewhere but no definitive answer. Here goes:
Is it true that, all other things being equal, PAL games are less hardware intensive/demanding to emulate than NTSC?
I recently watched a review of a retro handheld device, and it was running some emulator at the edge of its capabilities, (think NGC/PS2 here) and the reviewer found that PAL versions ran better / less slowdowns, audio glitches, frame skips, than NTSC versions. His reasoning was that all other things being the same, the fact that a PAL version runs at 50 frames per second, and the NTSC version at 60 frames per second means a little less "work" for the emulator / hardware, which translates into better performance.
Now, since I know nothing about the current state of emulation, that made sense to me at the time, but is it actually true?
With the modern emulators interpreting the code more directly (rather than simulating a virtual machine and then converting the outputs of that simulation to standard output), and not bound by the physical constraints of the original hardware, many aspects of games can be tweaked on the fly, including textures, resolution, effects - and framerate. So does the original framerate mean anything any more? I know frame skipping is one of the tricks to run a game at full speed when the hardware is struggling so it means something (and the above explanation makes sense that way), but does the PAL/NTSC version "impose" the native framerate by default, and runs on it, or do both versions run on whatever the emulator prefers?
Enlighten me.
Is it true that, all other things being equal, PAL games are less hardware intensive/demanding to emulate than NTSC?
I recently watched a review of a retro handheld device, and it was running some emulator at the edge of its capabilities, (think NGC/PS2 here) and the reviewer found that PAL versions ran better / less slowdowns, audio glitches, frame skips, than NTSC versions. His reasoning was that all other things being the same, the fact that a PAL version runs at 50 frames per second, and the NTSC version at 60 frames per second means a little less "work" for the emulator / hardware, which translates into better performance.
Now, since I know nothing about the current state of emulation, that made sense to me at the time, but is it actually true?
With the modern emulators interpreting the code more directly (rather than simulating a virtual machine and then converting the outputs of that simulation to standard output), and not bound by the physical constraints of the original hardware, many aspects of games can be tweaked on the fly, including textures, resolution, effects - and framerate. So does the original framerate mean anything any more? I know frame skipping is one of the tricks to run a game at full speed when the hardware is struggling so it means something (and the above explanation makes sense that way), but does the PAL/NTSC version "impose" the native framerate by default, and runs on it, or do both versions run on whatever the emulator prefers?
Enlighten me.