It always puzzled me why exactly video game console emulation is so resource-intensive. Despite the systems themselves often being about as powerful as a severely outdated (at the time of the system’s release) PC, their emulators always require ridiculously powerful PCs to be able to run the games at full speed and native resolution. Why exactly is it so resource-intensive? I’m not looking for an explanation along the lines of “it’s resource-intensive cause it takes a lot of power to emulate the whole environment” cause it’s basically like answering with “it requires a lot of power cause it requires a lot of power”. I want to know *exactly* why I need a 4-core, 4.5GHz Intel i7 10th gen to be able to run a 2007 PS3 game in 720p, 13 years after its release.
In: Technology
In order to make an emulator the programmer has to reverse engineer what code the game is calling and rewrite it. There were multiple teams of people that wrote the operating system for the PS4. Some of which were dedicated to just optimizing the code to make it run faster.
The people writing emulators are much smaller groups of people who often are just trying to get the functionality to work. Simply put they don’t have the manpower to spend time optimizing the code. So you need to have more powerful hardware to make up for the less than optimal code.
It’s a bit like speaking through a translator. If you have a high-schooler that’s barely passed a couple Spanish classes, you’re likely going to have massive translation issues and it’s going to take a long time to get your message across.
Now hire a professional who knows every little intricacy of both languages and you can have a near-perfect conversation quickly without pissing anyone off because they said something they shouldn’t have 🙂
Usually with emulators, you’re dealing with two completely different hardware architectures and you can’t just run an instruction meant for Processor 1 on Processor 2. It has to be translated, and much like verbal languages, it’s usually not word for word – it has to be put in the “dialect” to be understood correctly. That takes time, and the faster the machine runs, the easier it’ll do it in real time.
Because you aren’t running the game. You are running an operating system which is simulating a piece of hardware which is running the game. It’s like… Instead of watching a movie, hiring people to reenact all the actors and crew on set creating the movie and then watching that.
Which is why it’s better to port a game, if possible, where you actually make whatever adjustments are needed to let it run naively in the PC.
Everything in a computer is numbers. Including the instructions telling it what to do. So on a certain processor, to calculate 1+1, we’ll say “load 1 into register A, load 1 into register B, add register A to Register B.” Load into register A might be 10 on one computer, and 34 on another, so to emulate, the second computer needs to look up what instruction 10 means, and do operation 34 instead. This takes several instructions.
The graphics hardware is similar. We send sequences of numbers, and they’re different on PCs so the CPU needs to translate.
Also, the PS3 is not that simple. It also has multiple CPUs so each has to be emulated.
For every calculation the original game/system makes, your computer needs to make 10 (guessing number) calculations to simulate the original system. They don’t have the same tools/operations/instructions to be able to do exactly what the original system would do with the new one.
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