System requirements

[JHoningh]

Hello fellow boxers

 

I was wondering what the ideal configuration is when using a PC desktop.

How much ram, what kind of processor, soundchip etc.

I'm talking about what you need for the more recent generation gamesystems like PS2, XBOX.

Or what kind of PC would one need to be able to play all supported consoles on Launchbox?

 

My specs:

 

MB: MSI 970 Gaming AMD 970 socket with Realtek soundchip onboard.

Processor: AMD FX 8350

Memory: Corsair 8 GB DDR3 2133 MHz

OS: Windows 10 running on a Samsung SSD 250 Gb

 

I could check out system requirement for each individual emulator but there imust be a general guideline.

What are your thoughts?

 

Thank you in advance

 

Greetings,

 

JHoningh

[Lordmonkus]

That system is plenty to run pretty much everything available right now, even Cemu will run fine for the most part.

I have pretty much the same system but instead of 8 gig of ram I have 16. I also have an AMD 8350 CPU and a 970 GPU.

PS2 runs perfectly fine within the confines of the emulators quality as it stands since it is far from perfect to begin with. There is no Xbox emulator worth talking about so forget that. Dreamcast, much like PS2 emulation is in a relatively shitty state where the emulation has problems to start and system specs wont matter. Dolphin for Gamecube and Wii runs great. I have been testing some Cemu emulation recently and the few games that do work run well, Mario 3D Worlds runs at a full 60 fps while Bayonetta 2 and Xenoblade Chronicles X aren't quite full speed they are very close.

[Retro808]

Agree with @lordmonkus 

One of my systems has similar specs only difference is running an AMD RX480 GPU. Pretty much on that machine what lordmonkus described is true for me as well with the AMD GPU.  

For modern system emulation the biggest hurdle is how far developed the emulator is or rather is not. 

I will add that Launchbox/BigBox runs smooth on that machine even with a lot of images and video playbacks the front end deals with. So performance of the front end is not much of an issue as your library grows. 

Edited April 4, 2017 by Retro808

[SentaiBrad]

Also, LaunchBox supports anything and everything, there is no limitation. The only limitation if any is generally down to settings or the emulator / game and not LB.

[JHoningh]

Thnx for the replies

 

I forgot to mention i also have a GTX 960 GPU

So i guess as lordmonkus said i will be able to run up to ps2 generation consoles.

I am planning to put in 8 Gig more in my system so things will go even smoother then.

 

[Lordmonkus]

In terms of emulation the extra ram really won't make any difference except for maybe some the Cemu Wii U emulation with the shader caches.

When it comes to emulation CPU is king over all else. The video card does come in when you start talking about shaders and uprezzing the internal resolution but that doesn't require anything fancy at all, a simple 1 gig ddr5 vram video card will suffice.

[SentaiBrad]

The extra RAM is nice in the specific LaunchBox situation, making sure everything has enough, especially if you give LB 4GB in the RAM Cache options menu. Between OS, LB and the emulator, not having enough is possible. On a lean machine or not running LB RAM has probably the least bearing on emulation (except for the situation Monkus cited).

[JHoningh]

9 hours ago, lordmonkus said:

In terms of emulation the extra ram really won't make any difference except for maybe some the Cemu Wii U emulation with the shader caches.

When it comes to emulation CPU is king over all else. The video card does come in when you start talking about shaders and uprezzing the internal resolution but that doesn't require anything fancy at all, a simple 1 gig ddr5 vram video card will suffice.

So what you're saying is that (most) emulators don't use GPU power at all?

If so, that's a shame.

 

The extra ram is maybe not so much used by LB but is always welcome for other things like multitasking and heavy duty pc games.

And who knows, maybe in the future emulation of seventh generation consoles.

 

By the way, you say most emulators use primarly CPU power but do you know if there are emulators that can also use multi-core?

Maybe this discussion is not really about LB i know, i'm just curious.

 

Thanks

[Lordmonkus]

Yes, the raw emulation relies on CPU power and in the vast majority of cases single core performance, there are a couple of emulators that will use 2 cores such as Dolphin (maybe RPCS3 the PS3 emu). Without getting super technical into why this is it is because of how the timings of of the old systems are emulated. If you start spreading different functions of the emulator across multiple CPU cores or onto the GPU it becomes a timing nightmare and game timings get way out of whack.

The graphics card however will handle graphical enhancements such as shaders and resolution upscaling.

And yes of course more ram will help your system with multi-tasking and modern PC games, I was talking strictly in terms of the emulation itself. For example if you had 4 gigs of ram and expanded that to 16 gigs you would not see that ram do anything for your performance in the emulator itself though you may see some benefit from having more ram to handle the windows side of things

[SentaiBrad]

There are emulators that use the GPU: PCSX2, Dolphin and CEMU come to mind right away, but Monkus is correct. Most don't and most do single core operations. To be fair to them too, they don't really need to use more than a single core for emulation. NES emulation is fairly painless for example. Even something like Bsnes Accuracy, which has a decent CPU requirement, is most likely single core.

[JHoningh]

10 hours ago, SentaiBrad said:

There are emulators that use the GPU: PCSX2, Dolphin and CEMU come to mind right away, but Monkus is correct. Most don't and most do single core operations. To be fair to them too, they don't really need to use more than a single core for emulation. NES emulation is fairly painless for example. Even something like Bsnes Accuracy, which has a decent CPU requirement, is most likely single core.

I understand that emulating a console like the NES doesn't require so much power.

But i thought that for the more demanding ones a multi-core cpu and a high-end gpu would be an advantage.

But now i understand that emulating specific consoles with non-generic chipsets and the like is difficult to program due to timing differences.

 

 

[shadowdragon]

I may be wrong, but I believe that PCSX2  uses 2 cores that can use 4 threads if the CPU supports it.   Also, I just want to add that some games on PCSX2 struggles with hardware rendering where there are black vertical bars that appear meaning that software rendering is more stable to use with LB.  I have a I7-6700k OC'd, so I generally have no problem with emulating ps2 games.

[SentaiBrad]

And if you use software rendering modes that will use only your CPU and no GPU. If an emulator has that option, then you know right away if it's using a combination of the two. Some may not give it and use the GPU too. Like RetroArch has that option for some cores, but not all, but if you use a Shader it will use GPU regardless, because it's post processing. Some of the more demanding emulators will start to use multiple CPU cores, people are becoming wise to this. Also, finally, more and more emulators are taking advantage of 64bit processing too. There is more than a RAM limit when talking 32bit and 64bit, but RAM for the more demanding stuff (like CEMU and RPSC3 I would imagine) will help in the long run rather than hurt it. Hell, those emulators are 64bit only.