SOC Boards (x86) What's out there for higherend Emulation

[natemac00]

I was looking at making an all-in-one joystick mame box.

I wanted to use something a little more powerful then a Raspberry Pi and was hoping to us LB.

I was looking at one of the UDOO x86 boards, has anyone had any experiences with these?
Would you recommend something else?
What's the GPU processing on this equivalent to discrete GPU?
Can these handle highend emulators like Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, GameCube?

Does anyone know what kind of board the Pandora's Box systems?

Just looking for a discussion to see what peoples experiences are with these.

 

I did find the ETA PRIME Video using the UDOO Advance Board (Intel Celeron N3160)

 

Edited August 17, 2017 by natemac00

[DOS76]

Hey welcome to the community before we get anywhere you do realize that you need Windows to run LB I didn't see it mentioned and I see those x86 pcs are running Android.

[natemac00]

Just now, DOS76 said:

Hey welcome to the community before we get anywhere you do realize that you need Windows to run LB I didn't see it mentioned and I see those x86 pcs are running Android.

Yup! that's why i was looking at the x86 UDOO's rather then any of the others.

[natemac00]

I also was looking at the Intel NUC computers, much more expensive though. I believe the i3 version starts at $270

[DOS76]

Some the modern Atom chips are pretty good and support Vulkan

[Lordmonkus]

2 hours ago, natemac00 said:

Can these handle highend emulators like Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, GameCube?

To start out PS1 is by no means higher end emulation nowadays I would say it is more middle of the road at the most, even a Pi 3 can handle it just fine.

Gamecube / Wii is probably next in terms of power needed to run the emulator (Dolphin) mainly because of the quality of the emulator itself and its optimization, those devs did an amazing job. I don't know where the bottom line needed to enjoy it would sit but I would say something in the 3 GHz neighborhood is safe. You could probably do lower end running the Ishiruuka builds which have a few extra speed hacks. Again I do say 3 GHz to be safe only because I do not know where the lower limits of the emulator are.

Dreamcast is in weird state because none of the emulators for it are what I personally would consider "good". That isn't to say that Demul and NullDC are bad emulators, they just aren't polished and still need a lot of work to get on par with the likes of Dolphin, PPSSPP and everything else of its generation and prior. Demul requires fairly beefy CPU power but is the better emulator while NullDC runs better on lower end hardware just with more emulation issues.

PS2 however is whole other beast. While it does the job and admirably well it is an absolute mess in terms of its design and as such requires a fairly good CPU to do it enjoyably.

At the end of the day you can call me cynical or whatever but SOCs just aren't powerful enough for "enjoyable emulation" of anything beyond PS1 or N64. I put enjoyable emulation in quotes because that can be subjective depending on the person playing and exactly what games they want to play.

[DOS76]

Dovella has one of the newer Atoms and reported that Dolphin was playing nice on there if he used the Vulkan render but beyond that I don't have any experience beyond my 2015 SOC which is lacking RAM more than anything at 2GB.

[natemac00]

Thanks for the insight @lordmonkus, I'm getting ready to make my own cabinet and I was trying to find a way to keep all the internals in the controller area, that way the controller part could transfer out of the cabinet when I needed it to be portable.

I wish I could test out one of the Intel i5 NUC with the 640 GPU. It starts at $330 with/out memory or HD, But if it ends up not being that big of an improvement over the UDOO, that's a big price jump with little gain.

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-BOXNUC7I5BNK-NUC-Kit-Components/dp/B01N2UMKZ5/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1502998391&sr=1-3&keywords=intel%2Bnuc%2Bi5&th=1

[Lordmonkus]

The most important thing in emulation performance will be single thread performance and clock speed.

Also keep in mind that more than enough power to run an emulator is not necessarily going to waste when using an emulator that has a "frame delay" feature such as Retroarch. What this does is it allows you you raise the frame delay which in turn reduces input latency and this is something that the more powerful the CPU is the higher you can bump that frame delay.

[natemac00]

i5 NUC with 4GB of ram for $304... hmmm.

maybe it’s a sign.

https://slickdeals.net/f/10471244-intel-nuc-7th-gen-i5-boxnuc7i5bnh-w-free-4gb-ram-for-304-no-tax-free-s-h-at-newegg

[Lordmonkus]

https://ark.intel.com/products/97539/Intel-Core-i5-7260U-Processor-4M-Cache-up-to-3_40-GHz

Looking at the CPU specs the base speed of the CPU Is pretty low for what I would call the more higher end emulation like PS2 and Gamecube / Wii but everything else should be fine. With the turbo speeds if it can maintain them consistently then it should be fine for the most part outside of PCSX2s funky behaviour which is there for any system as it is.

[mothergoose729]

An UDO would work fine for many classic MAME arcade games, as would a rasberry PI 3. It looks like you are leaning towards the mini PC route, which definitely offers the best performance and compatibility. If you are going to go full PC, a half hight GPU can be really useful in some cases. A 750TI with a mini ITX board and a powerful CPU can do a lot that a powerful CPU alone with integrated graphics can't do, especially considering that nvidia GPU drivers are much better supported by opengl and vulkan based emulators in general. 

With that being said, on the SOC side of things, the main benefit of a UDO board like that is you can run native windows games and you can run windows versions of certain emulators, launchbox, and other software. When it comes to compatibility though, the pi3 boards have lots of software that has had the crap optimized out of it for this specific board. Although the UDO boards are much more powerful, especially on the CPU, game compatibility and performance in emulators are very similar. The UDO would probably be able to run a few more n64 titles than the PI, but not much else would be different, and I would trust in the special tailored pi3 builds for emulators than I necessarily would for certain emulators configured for low end computers. If all you want to do is have a MAME cabinet and run a few popular 2d systems and playstation games as an after though, you might actually have an easier time with a Pi3 and its plethora of specialized software and huge support community. 

Just my 2cents

Edited August 18, 2017 by mothergoose729

[natemac00]

Thanks @mothergoose729, yes my main pc is a ITX computer and I love how small it is, but I do have an i7 and a GTX1070 in it so it’s by far not underpowered. I really like the idea of making this ultra portable but a little more stronger then a pi. I also want to build off of LaunchBox which binds me to the NUC or UDOO at the moment.

I honestly thought the GPU was the bottleneck of the emulators with lower end PCs but from what I’m understanding, it’s the single thread cpu I should be keeping an eye on.

I may start with an UDOO just for price point and since I’m building off of a Windows base, can easily move to a NUC.

Edited August 18, 2017 by natemac00

[Lordmonkus]

51 minutes ago, natemac00 said:

I honestly thought the GPU was the bottleneck of the emulators with lower end PCs but from what I’m understanding, it’s the single thread cpu I should be keeping an eye on.

The GPU for the most part has little to no effect on the actual emulation itself. I say for the most part because the only emulators that even use that all for anything would be Dolphin, PCSX2 (hardware renderer), CEMU and certain hardware rendering cores in Retroarch such as the N64 and PSX HW ones. Even though those cores make use of the GPU it is still only minor and only for the graphical enhancement functionality such as the internal resolution scaling or effects like anti aliasing. One other place where a dedicated GPU does come in handy is with Mame and Retroarch's shaders but that does not require anything too powerful by todays standards. In my HTPC I have an old Radeon 7800 series card with 1 gig of gddr5 vram and it can handle even the heaviest of RA shaders without issues.

The CPU does the bulk of the grunt work while the GPU puts the fit and finish on the final output.

This could change going forward with more modern systems however as the Dolphin team have recently discussed passing some of the Wiis GPU functionality (shader cache) off on to the PCs GPU. If and when this happens then the GPU will become more important with the more modern emulation like with Cemu and RPCS3 and beyond. Also when this happens I doubt it will ever outpace the CPU requirements though like how with modern PC gaming the bulk of the time the bottlenecks are in the GPU, not the CPU.

[natemac00]

@lordmonkus I would agree that is where the new emulators would move, my day job is as a 3D artist and this year we switched from a CPU rendering workflow to a GPU based one. The fact that we can pile on additional GPUs into our network for a fraction of the cost and render an insane amount faster, I think GPU processing is going to become very mainstream item in the near future.

[Lordmonkus]

I cannot speak as a programmer or a dev of any kind whatsoever, I can only speak as someone who's been a "power user" of PCs for 20+ years and gaming for 35+ years. It's my main hobby and I do a lot of reading so I do have a bit of an understanding of how things work in general terms.

I don't see the emulation itself being pushed on to the GPU (but its is possible I guess). I see it more a case of since these newer systems have dedicated GPUs themselves the emulator devs will push that specific functionality of the emulator to the GPU of the PC. It will be more of a 50/50 deal, both will be equally requires for the more modern systems.

[DOS76]

do NES and Atari 2600 really even need GPU rendering you can pretty much emulate them on toaster.

[Lordmonkus]

No. It wasn't really until the N64 when you started to see proper dedicated 3D hardware, the PS1 and Saturn had rudimentary 3D at best. I'm not sure at what point you got what would be considered something comparable to anything modern until the Gamecube and Wii, maybe the PS2 and Dreamcast.

[mothergoose729]

3 hours ago, lordmonkus said:

The GPU for the most part has little to no effect on the actual emulation itself. I say for the most part because the only emulators that even use that all for anything would be Dolphin, PCSX2 (hardware renderer), CEMU and certain hardware rendering cores in Retroarch such as the N64 and PSX HW ones. Even though those cores make use of the GPU it is still only minor and only for the graphical enhancement functionality such as the internal resolution scaling or effects like anti aliasing. One other place where a dedicated GPU does come in handy is with Mame and Retroarch's shaders but that does not require anything too powerful by todays standards. In my HTPC I have an old Radeon 7800 series card with 1 gig of gddr5 vram and it can handle even the heaviest of RA shaders without issues.

The CPU does the bulk of the grunt work while the GPU puts the fit and finish on the final output.

This could change going forward with more modern systems however as the Dolphin team have recently discussed passing some of the Wiis GPU functionality (shader cache) off on to the PCs GPU. If and when this happens then the GPU will become more important with the more modern emulation like with Cemu and RPCS3 and beyond. Also when this happens I doubt it will ever outpace the CPU requirements though like how with modern PC gaming the bulk of the time the bottlenecks are in the GPU, not the CPU.

You're right, ofc, a dedicated GPU makes no sense for anything before n64. 

For the emulators that are GPU accelerated, they work much better and have fewer bugs on nvidia hardware. It isn't really the GPU power you want, it is the nvidia graphics drivers. A 750ti can be had for less than a hundred dollars and runs off of PCIE power off the board. If later generation emulators with upscaling are important to you, a graphics card is a good investment. 

Edited August 19, 2017 by mothergoose729

[Lordmonkus]

There was an article written over on the Dolphin website that talked about how I see GPUs being truly implemented into emulation of more modern consoles going forward. While it certainly is somewhat technical I think it is fairly understandable.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/