Anyone know how Skylake/Kaby Lake Pentiums fare for emulation?

[airbikecop]

Looking to build a new light gaming/emulation machine, buying parts when I can afford them.

I was looking to go with a Kaby Lake Pentium but the prices have gone through the roof! The G4650 the price has gone up and is at or near i3 pricing and honestly I'm wondering if I'll be okay with a Skylake Pentium. Lack of AVX/AVX 2 hurt emulation?

[Lordmonkus]

Clock speed and single core performance are the 2 most important things when it comes to a CPU and emulation so it's going to be very good bang for the buck.

[mothergoose729]

Due to some quirks in SSE a haswell CPU can be faster in some workloads (RCPS3 developer claim its 10% faster or so than kaby lake clock per clock), but for the most part the IPC for intel hasn't changed much sense sandy bridge, but the clock speeds have gone up. A 7700k is ideal for emulation, even at stock clock speeds. 

To run all mature emulators at full speed, a 3.5ghz+ haswell or later dual core is the minimum, and a 4.0-4.5ghz quad core is ideal for the most intensive games (that can still be run at full speed at all). 

Of course, if you exclude the 6th generation console emulators, and choose emulator that are just really accurate instead of uber accurate, then a pi 3 is just about enough. Depends on what you are trying to do. 

Edited July 11, 2017 by mothergoose729

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah the newer emulators such as Cemu and RPCS3 may be difficult to get running at a suitable speed. Keep in mind these emulators are also very new and have a long ways to go in terms of optimization.

2 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

A 7700k is ideal for emulation

That is just massive overkill for emulation purposes.

4 minutes ago, mothergoose729 said:

4.0-4.5ghz quad core

As far as I am aware of only RPCS3 would take advantage of more than 2 core. The vast majority of emulators only use 1 and Dolphin can use 2.

[mothergoose729]

Just now, lordmonkus said:

Yeah the newer emulators such as Cemu and RPCS3 may be difficult to get running at a suitable speed. Keep in mind these emulators are also very new and have a long ways to go in terms of optimization.

That is just massive overkill for emulation purposes.

As far as I am aware of only RPCS3 would take advantage of more than 2 core. The vast majority of emulators only use 1 and Dolphin can use 2.

It depends. For the most part, yeah, you don't need anywhere near the much. Some notable exceptions include the handful of PCSX2 games which require a powerful CPU to run smoothly (especially if you are forced to run them in the software render), some games in dolphin that smooth out a bit with a faster CPU, and the cutting edge not-really-ready for prime time emulators like Cemu and RCPS3. 

A pentium dual core will be fine for a lot of stuff. The areas where you might struggle are 

1) Mednafen Saturn (3.5ghz quad core recommended)

2) Higan/BSNES (3.0ghz or so single core recommended)

3)  Beetle PSX Software Render (native res should be fine, 2x res might not be smooth)

And a few other edge cases. 

[Lordmonkus]

Ok, so Mednafen is suggested to have a 4 core. One could also make the argument that it is also a very new emulator since that part of Mednafen is less than a year old and could still use some optimization. That is tough to say though since the Saturn is such a complicated beast with it's dual cpu and dual vdp that it will need the raw power.

Higan / BSnes is still single core and so is PSX. To scale PSX beyond 2x with good speed use a hardware renderer and that then depends on the video card.

Bottom line though is the OP is working on a budget based off their post. So as long as they keep their expectations in check the G4650 would handle most things just fine, just avoid the newer cutting edge emulators.

Of course a more expensive and modern i5 / i7 with high clock speeds would be better but you pay a lot more for that. It's always a budget vs expectations question.

[madpossum]

I'm running Launchbox with systems from the Atari 2600 up to the PS2 and Wii on both my main PC with an overclocked i7-6700k and my HTPC with an i3-4170. Mednafen Saturn also runs fine on both. There's more of a difference between them because of the graphics cards when emulating more modern systems in hardware mode and cranking up the resolution than any differences caused by the CPUs (980ti vs RX7950).

I'd say you'd be fine with a Kaby Lake Pentium like the G4650 since it has hyperthreading or any more recent i3. I wouldn't go for a Skylake or older Pentium because they don't have hyperthreading. While they would be mostly fine for strictly emulation, once you start adding background processes running and trying to do more with your system than just emulating it will really hold it back. You also mentioned light gaming, you will have trouble running many current games on a strictly dual core without hyperthreading.

My HTPC with the Devil's Caynon (Haswell refresh) i3-4170 and 7950 graphics card runs all my emulators as well as modern Steam games (usually at least at medium settings). That's also with Kodi and other things running in the background. I'd recommend the Kaby Pentium or any Ivy Bridge or above i3 if need to save some money. Don't be afraid to look around the used market, I've actually saved money on builds before by buying used Dell or HP desktops cheap and stripping them for parts.

[airbikecop]

It's not so much budget but I'm building a low profile matx machine with half-height cards. The G4560 price went way up and now the low profile GTX 1050 TI's have disappeared/become hard to find too. I have done a full size HTPC and honestly it wasn't worth it in the past. I spent more time messing with it than playing, something locked like this Pentium will encourage me to spend more time playing games than tinkering, haha.

I'm a huge Sega fan and Mednafen Saturn runs pretty solidly on my i5 2500k at stock if not full speed. Only slows down if I have a lot of Chrome windows open - and yeah I have 16gb of ram in this machine. I think people here and Reddit said it ran fine on lesser hardware like AMD FX chips. I really doubt that it uses/requires more than two cores.

Not terribly interested in emulation past Wii/PS2 so Dolphin and PCSX 2 are the most extreme I would go but honestly and realistically it may be a long time before I get to those systems/emulators so I'm not terribly bothered. At some point I do plan on putting a quadcore in - a locked one but that'll be in the future once prices go down/I can afford it.

 

EDIT: Looks like a restock of the 1050 TI LP I was looking at on Amazon is going to get restocked. Hopefully the CPU too.

Edited July 12, 2017 by airbikecop

[Lordmonkus]

According to the Mednafen documentation the recommended CPU for Saturn is"

"Mednafen's Sega Saturn emulation is extremely CPU intensive. The minimum recommended CPU is a quad-core Intel Haswell-microarchitecture CPU with a base frequency of >= 3.3GHz and a turbo frequency of >= 3.7GHz(e.g. Xeon E3-1226 v3), but note that this recommendation does not apply to any unofficial ports or forks, which may have higher CPU requirements."

https://mednafen.github.io/documentation/ss.html

It does run fine on AMD CPUs as well, I have an 8350 @ 4 GHz and it has zero issues with running it.

As with any emulation the further you go up the chain to newer and / or more complex systems being emulated the faster and more modern CPU you need to run them at proper speeds. 

[airbikecop]

Runs fine on my 2500k machine but I think it has higher IPC though. Either way hopefully the CPU gets in stock and I can get the system built sooner than later other than the GPU. Really excited to build this but sucks I have to piece out orders.