Okay, I'm looking about to get a new PC those days. Sites that provide tutorials/guidelines for people looking for a new PC say that a good graphic card is essential for gamers, but as it's more expensive it's a wastet for casual people.
I really don't know much about PCs and I'd as well ask there because there is many people arround that know about PCs and emulators. Will emulators run somoother/faster on a PC with a good graphic card as opposed to one with a casual integreated/shared graphic card (at equal CPU power) ?
The problem is not to run NES emulators, as even Nestopia and Nintendulator runs fine on my current PC (which is not very powerfull by todays standards). But GBA emulation with VisualBoyAdvance is a bit hazardous, (and goes really terrible as soon as the VRAM viewer with auto-refresh is enabled), PSX emulation was a lot of trouble with a lot of graphical glitches, and DS emulation is just so slow it's not even playable.
Since emulators emulate a system, I guess a fully accurate emulator computes the graphics the emulated system would ouput and send the result "as-it" the the graphic card so that would imply that while a PC gamer should be lookinf for average CPU and great GPU, an emulator used would have beeter to look for a great CPU and average GPU. But maybe I'm wrong.
In my experience, all classic systems are in fact better emulated on PCs with on-board video. Don't ask me why, but across the 4 computers I've run emulators on (not much of a difference in CPU speed), the 2 with on-board video performed better. No slowdowns with maximum refresh on FCEUXD's debug windows and full speed NTSC emulation, which wasn't always true on the PCs with dedicated video cards.
Even PlayStation 1 and N64 run fine without a dedicated card. So I guess that if all you want to do is play old games, don't bother getting an expensive card, most recent on-board ones will do fine.
Well it's really weird. Common sense would imply that at worst a dedicated card would just be a waste and "pass data trough the screen" without computing anything. That would be weird if it actually slowed things down, but if you say so... Maybe my current PC doesn't run GBA/PSX emulation smooth enough because of my dedicated graphic card ?
And what is the best, integeated or shared ?
From my experience emulation is a heavily CPU-bound task. When I ran my DS emulator through CodeAnalyst, the time spent in the graphics plugin was never more than 10-15% of the total time iirc. And most of those 10-15% was probably spent on having the CPU doing software rendering of the 2D layers and sprites.
As GPGPU solutions evolve it'll hopefully be possible to move a lot of work from the CPU to the GPU. But right now I don't think any console emulators put the GPU to heavy use, except maybe a Gamecube/XBOX/PSP emulator. I remember being able to play Super Mario 64 at good speed with an ATI Rage 8MB card.
I wonder if any video cards run slowly when you make them upscale 256x240 to 1680x1050?
I'm talking about laptop video cards in power saving mode.
Upscaling the 256x240 pixel texture of the emulated display to 1280x1050* is just drawing one huge quad to the screen. I don't know of any emus that implement NTSC or Scale2x filtering as a pixel shader, or if it's even possible on an Intel GMA.
* Yes, 1280. That amount of pillarboxing preserves the 8:7 PAR.
I recently got a new graphics card and desmume performs a little better in Open GL mode now.
There seem to be people developing some kind of filters for N64 emulators that make heavy use of current gfx cards' pixel shader technology.
Unless you want to experience that, a high-end gfx card really isn't that important. A faster cpu will probably be much more beneficial, especially if you use VBA's VRAM viewer a lot.
OK Thanks for response guys. So now I know that if I have any extra cash to spend I'd rather look for a performent CPU than a good GPU.
And use the money you save on the GPU to buy a decent-size HDTV so that more than one person can fit around your monitor.
Didn't someone said NES game were running poorly on many modern HDTV ?
(and BTW a graphic card is about $80-$200, while a TV is about $500-$1500 so what you say doesn't really apply)
The real NES looks like shit and runs a little slow on HDTV's. Also I hear tell that the upscaler in some can't actually handle the low rez it puts out and wont work at all, Emulators are ok as long as you use a good resolution and enable v-sink.
The NES through my Vizio HDTV looks like the NTSC filter in Nestopia. And there's noticeably less lag on the TV when I play from a progressive source such as a PC or my Wii in 480p mode than when I play from a 480i or 240p source such as NES, Super NES, or Wii in 480i mode.
Nes trough composite looks pretty good on my hdtv. Not as good as for example on a crt.....(depending on crt) but stil pretty good.
Well, Vizio is extremely uncommon here in europe I guess. Phillips is the most widely know TV manufacturer, followed by Sony, Samsunc, Panasonic, etc...