Why can most computers run games like RDR2, Cyberpunk, etc. Really fast but when emulating ps3/Xbox360 games it lags and can barely run it?
In: 690
The issue here is not age, but emulation.
Console games are built to run on their respective consoles. On them, they can run optimally, because the system architecture of your average console doesn’t change significantly over its lifetime. Sure, you might have increased storage, or a newer model of the same processor, but generally, the system architecture stays the same.
A game that is released both for console and PC generally runs better on console, because the devs know exactly what system to expect on console. However, a PC game has to be able to run on any system configuration that can realistically run the game. This means you can’t optimize it for one setup, as this reduces performance on everything else.
Emulation has a similar issue. Unlike with a direct port, when you emulate games, you essentially make the game think it runs on console when it isn’t. However, this is just not what is happening. With older games, and i mean anything before the 1990s, this is not an issue for most people. Sure, the emulator might not be 100% accurate, but unless you’re a speedrunner, these tiny deviations probably don’t impact your experience. However, when you get into the 2000s, and consoles reach a realm where their processing power is, at the very least, comparable in order of magnitude to modern PCs, even if your average purpose-built gaming PC blows a PS3 or an XBox 360 out of the water in terms of power, these differences add up.
One example of this is found in the WiiWare version of Mario 64. In this game, there is a type of platform that moves up and down in a repeating cycle. Or at least, it’s supposed to. And while it does on the original hardware, in the WiiWare version (which is also just emulation at the end of the day), there is a bug where, due to a rounding error that occurs because the Wiis processor rounds differently from the N64s, the platforms will slowly (and i mean over the course of several hours) migrate upwards, as they move upwards a tiny bit more than they move downwards.
Of course, you could instruct the Wiis processor to use the correct rounding type here, but since this bug won’t ever affect the vast majority of players, and it would decrease performance to fix something that is so obscure, the devs probably didn’t know about it until a speedrunner found it by leaving his Wii running overnight by accident, it’s not worth doing. If this bug were more pronounced, however, they would have to make sure the emulator processes this properly. Of course, with a game like, say, Pokemon Yellow, which is, quite frankly, primitive by today’s standards, even if it was quite a feat back then (and also quite a broken mess), these slowdown are barely noticable, because a modern computer could run this game without flinching. Play something like RDR on an emulator though, and these tiny slowdowns add up, because the game is orders of magnitude more complex.
Latest Answers