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 Despite the systems themselves often being about as powerful as a severely outdated (at the time of the system’s release) PC, their emulators always require ridiculously powerful PCs to be able to run the games at full speed and native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
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.
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