Hacking Give me your best estimate, what CPU will be "good enough" for 7th gen/Wii U emulation?

jamieyello

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I want to know if it's worth future proofing when I build my new PC, I know some games are running full speed on these emulators even now. How many cores, do you think? Will rpcs3 make multi core cpus more worth it with the ps3's 8 core cpu?
 

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I just want to correct you because it pissed me off that you think Wii U is 7th gen but Wii U is actually 8th gen and started the 8th. Not the shitty PS4 or XBOX One (which, if played for more than an hour, melts the plastic) started it. God dammit. I always have to correct people because it feels like my job.
 

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When it comes to the number of cores i'd say number of cores to be emulated + one more for audio emulation.
Wii U has 3 cores. So the emulator could use 4 cores.
A lot Wii games can be emulated at full speed on my i3 CPU at a clockspeed of 2.27GHz. So I assume that 4GHz should be enough if the emulator is as advanced as the Dolphin Emulator.
Just an assumption. I may be wrong
 

Xenon Hacks

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I just want to correct you because it pissed me off that you think Wii U is 7th gen but Wii U is actually 8th gen and started the 8th. Not the shitty PS4 or XBOX One (which, if played for more than an hour, melts the plastic) started it. God dammit. I always have to correct people because it feels like my job.
Its still uses 7th gen tech so yeah and to @jamieyello the most you could possible need is an i5 650 Overclocked to 4.0 GHz.
 

jamieyello

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When it comes to the number of cores i'd say number of cores to be emulated + one more for audio emulation.
Wii U has 3 cores. So the emulator could use 4 cores.
A lot Wii games can be emulated at full speed on my i3 CPU at a clockspeed of 2.27GHz. So I assume that 4GHz should be enough if the emulator is as advanced as the Dolphin Emulator.
Just an assumption. I may be wrong

My cheap dual core quad manages some wii games as well. I'm looking for some kind of price range, GHz really isn't an accurate measurement of cpu power though. I don't know why that ever caught on.

I just want to correct you because it pissed me off that you think Wii U is 7th gen but Wii U is actually 8th gen and started the 8th. Not the shitty PS4 or XBOX One (which, if played for more than an hour, melts the plastic) started it. God dammit. I always have to correct people because it feels like my job.

I never said Wii U was a 7th gen console. You imagined that part.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Its still uses 7th gen tech so yeah and to @jamieyello the most you could possible need is an i5 650 Overclocked to 4.0 GHz.

Dual core? I don't know how long we'll be able to get away with that as the hardware emulated gets more and more cores.
 

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I just want to correct you because it pissed me off that you think Wii U is 7th gen but Wii U is actually 8th gen and started the 8th. Not the shitty PS4 or XBOX One (which, if played for more than an hour, melts the plastic) started it. God dammit. I always have to correct people because it feels like my job.

Have you ever thought that if you are having to correct everyone to see your point of view, that maybe your point of view is the one that is wrong???

I'm not crazy, but everyone around me is.

:yayu:wiiu4eva
 

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My cheap dual core quad manages some wii games as well. I'm looking for some kind of price range, GHz really isn't an accurate measurement of cpu power though. I don't know why that ever caught on.



I never said Wii U was a 7th gen console. You imagined that part.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------



Dual core? I don't know how long we'll be able to get away with that as the hardware emulated gets more and more cores.

"7th gen/Wii U emulation?" The title implies jamieyellow groups the wiiu with 7th gen consoles. Which is fair because it's about as powerful as the 7th gen.

But it's clear jamieyellow understands it's not a 7th gen console b/c he set it aside from them with the slash.
 
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It's not bashing a system to mention that its basic specs place it in the same "tier" of power as previous consoles. That's just the facts of life.

I've never liked the idea of "gens" anyway, given how much overlap system development has had.

Is the Wii U a seventh "gen" console? Or eighth?
Is the Wii a sixth? Or seventh?
Does the TurboExpress belong in the same "gen" as the Game Boy, despite being 16-bit, color, with a CPU nearly as fast as the SNES, and able to use the same games as its parent system?

We all know the "standard" answers to the questions above, but the reality is that attempting to define a system's power based upon its "gen" just ends up spinning around in circles.
 
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RodrigoDavy

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I think the most powerful PC won't be able to run Wii U fullspeed, honestly.

About the 7th/8th gen discussion, people forget that there are many other variables other than raw power of a console. The 8th gen focus on social media, online services, NFC, OSes running parallel to the game... and I think the 3DS is the one that truly started the 8th generation in this regard.

Wii U is definetely a 8th gen console, a console with something as Miiverse or Amiibo was unthinkable in 2005 when the 7th generation started.
 

frankGT

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Dolphin can run wii at full speed on recent intel chips using 2 cores.

Wii has 1 cpu core and wiiU has 3 cpu cores, this should be quite an incremente in weight plus there could be loss of performance on more parallelization.

Then the gpu side of things, wii has a more basic 12 gflops chip while the wiiU is packing a much more featured 352 gflops chip.

If i would have to guess, actual cpus might not be enouth and actual gpus are enouth.
 
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FAST6191

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a console with something as Miiverse or Amiibo was unthinkable in 2005 when the 7th generation started.

Look at something like the Legendz series back on the GBA and little widgets that unlocked game functionality is something you would have seen there, and taxing stupidity via such purchases/your children had existed for many years in electronics. Abstract chat platforms had existed for years (something like habbo hotel being a good example), I am struggling to think of ones on game consoles (2004 saw ping pals on the DS, earlier there were things like the game.com that had a model) but I am not getting to unthinkable, and a game console would hardly be an out there thought for such things.
 

gudenau

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What kind of emulation are you looking for? Interpreted, recompiled, hardware? Do you want hacks like 1920x1080 60hz for the xBox One and Playstation 4? For getting a recompiled emulstor for the Wii U should be possible now, bit that tends to be buggy; just look at Dolphin. If I recall correctly the x Vox One and PlayStation 4 uses x86, so you could leverage Intel's virtualization tech built into their CPUs. You would just need to create a hypervisor that oversees the hardware details.
Keep in mind, the CPU is easy; it is the GPU that is a pain in the butt.
Any questions?
 

Pacheko17

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My quad-core 1.8GHz I3 3217U runs 90% of all the Wii games I threw at it at full speed. So it should get somewhat playable speeds on Cemu. But we just gotta wait and see.
 

PhyChris

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please correct me if im wrong but my understanding of this emulator is the low level GPU emulation is not needed thanks to the new graphics librarys OpenGL 3.3, DirectX 12 and windows 10s lower level access to GPU hardware.
 

Wisenheimer

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Well, Microsoft managed to get Xbox 360 games running on the Xbox 1, and the Xbox 1 CPU is not particularly powerful. However, I suspect that there is a lot of optimization there and it has to be done on a game-by-game basis.

There is no way to guess how much CPU power a hacked-together Wii U emulator will require. Certainly a bit more than the Xbox 360. There is no way to guess the speed a fictional product will need. If it is as optimized as the Xbox 360 emulator, it should be able to run on a fairly low-end CPU. If it is as poorly optimized as most early emulators, you want one of the high end socket i7s (the one with the quad DDR4 controllers) with the highest possible clock speed.

This CPU, for instance, is only $600 and pretty fast with good thermal overhead and enough cores (six) to handle multi-core emulation pretty well.

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-i7-5930K-Haswell-E-Processor-BX80648I75930K/dp/B00MMLXMM8

But the reality is, if someone other than Nintendo develops a Wii U emulator, I bet this CPU will be obsolete before it is in a good playable state for commercial games. The Wii U is going to be a tough machine to emulate given that it has, if I remember correctly, five CPU cores across two different architectures (ARM and PPC)..
 

frankGT

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My quad-core 1.8GHz I3 3217U runs 90% of all the Wii games I threw at it at full speed.

Its a dual core. Dont be confused by hyperthreading. 4 logical threads, 2 working cores.

Well, Microsoft managed to get Xbox 360 games running on the Xbox 1, and the Xbox 1 CPU is not particularly powerful. However, I suspect that there is a lot of optimization there and it has to be done on a game-by-game basis.

One can only dream with such emulation... Nobody's on a paycheck.
The old school machines (arcade/8-16bit) gained imensely of fanbase dedication that cannot be compared with actual consoles.
 
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I just want to correct you because it pissed me off that you think Wii U is 7th gen but Wii U is actually 8th gen and started the 8th. Not the shitty PS4 or XBOX One (which, if played for more than an hour, melts the plastic) started it. God dammit. I always have to correct people because it feels like my job.
Didn't know my xbox melted after an hour wich that big ass fan in it causing everybody to call it a VCR.
 

Noctosphere

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Just to be clear
Generation I :
Magnavox Odyssey (Made by Ralph H. Baer, father of video game console)

Generation II :
Fairchild VES
RCA Studio II
Atari 2600

Handheld :
Microvision
Epoch Game Pocket Computer
Nintendo Game & Watch

---Video Game Crash---

Generation III:
Famicom
NES
Sega Master System
Atari 7800
Atari XEG S
Commodore 64 Game System
Amstrad GX4000

Handheld :
GameBoy


Generation IV :
TurboGrafX-16
Mega Drive/Sega Genesis
NeoGeo
Super Famicom/Snes
Pioneer Laser Active

Handheld :
GameBoy Pocket/GameBoy Color
Atari Lynx
Sega GameGear
TurboExpress

Generation V :
FM Towns Marty
Atari Jaguar
3DO Interactive
PC-FX
Sega 32X
Virtual Boy
Sega Saturn
Sony Playstation
Nintendo 64

Handheld :
Sega Nomad
GameBoy Pocket
Game.com
GameBoy Light
GameBoy Color
NeoGeo Pocket

Generation VI :
Sega DreamCast
Sony Playstation 2
Nintendo GameCube
Microsoft Xbox

Handheld :
GameBoy Advance
NeoGeo Pocket Color
WonderSwan Color

Generation VII :
Microsoft Xbox 360
Sony Playstation 3
Nintendo Wii

Handheld :
Nintendo DS
Sony Playstation Portable
N-Gage

Generation VIII :
Nintendo Wii U
Microsoft Xbox One
Sony Playstation 4

Handheld :
Nintendo 3ds
Playstation Vita

Generation IX :
Nintendo Project NX (Code name only)

Handheld :
New Nintendo 3DS (released in 2015, I think we can consider it as the first Gen 9 console)

Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#First_generation
 
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Centrix

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I just want to correct you because it pissed me off that you think Wii U is 7th gen but Wii U is actually 8th gen and started the 8th. Not the shitty PS4 or XBOX One (which, if played for more than an hour, melts the plastic) started it. God dammit. I always have to correct people because it feels like my job.

Question? what PS4 do you have? I got mine a few months after its launch and play it hours on end and haven't had any melting issues thus far lol :)
 

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