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?
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Another factor to performance is the accuracy of the emulation. Looking at older consoles, a lot of them had very unique hardware architectures which don’t resemble modern PCs in any way.
“High level emulation” or HLE, essentially looks at the code running and says “oh, you want to do X, on this system that means I should do Y to achieve the same thing”, which is a fast, but not very accurate way of handling things since you can’t always directly translate an action on one system to another. The emulation will have subtle differences to the original.
The alternative is “low level emulation” or LLE which doesn’t just try to translate instructions, but actually attempts to fully simulate part or all of the original hardware. This is far more intensive, because in some cases you’re trying to simulate things like voltages, hardware timings, data transfer rates, the electron beam in an old TV and so on. This is why “cycle-accurate emulators” like bSnes have hardware requirements hundreds of times higher than the original system had.
Why do we bother with such complex, low level emulation? Well, it’s a question of accuracy and faithfulness to the original experience. A game running natively on a console may actually play quite differently on a high-level emulator. Where the real system might crash, the emulator might play fine or with some visual glitches. Where the player can successfully make a jump in an emulator, it might have been impossible on the original system.
How low level you go is partly a philosophical question, whether you want to replicate the broad experience of the original game, or replicate it exactly as it was all those years ago.
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