Hi. I’m building a gaming PC (first time) and I’ll use it for emulation too. With RetroArch mostly. So I would like to run some Wii games (and PS2 games too) in 4k 60 FPS if that’s resonable. I never used Dolphin so I don’t know. What kind of components do I need? I plan to get: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card and Intel Core i5-9600K 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor. Will that be enough?
Those should be fine. For PS2, you’ll be limited more by the Play! core’s compatibility, so you’ll probably need to dip into using PCSX2 standalone. You’ll probably want to look into standalone Dolphin, as well, if you’re wanting to do anything beyond “casual” usage.
That is, the dolphin-libretro core works fine, it just doesn’t expose a lot of the advanced functionality that some games/users depend on.
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Would AMD Ryzen 5 3600 be good / better with Dolphin and PCSX2? The main reason that draws me to Intel is its older architecture which should be better for compatibility with older PC games. Otherwise AMD seems better value overall. Does Intel perform better with emulators?
Intel CPUs used to have better single core performance and IPC than AMD ones. Making them the better CPUs for emulators since emulators use 2 or 3 cores max in most cases and the more threads you get from an AMD CPU didn’t help.
Not sure how things are now but i see benchmarks and people claiming AMD has reached the same performance with their latest Ryzen CPUs so there should be no difference other than cost.
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It’s more than enough.
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How about compatibility with older PC games. I’d like to run some older PC games (non emulated). Some from 90s even. Would Intel be better with that or is AMD just as good?
I don’t think you can play PC games from the 90s non-emulated. There’s some very, very few exceptions, but in 99% of the cases, you need an emulator (like dosbox) or some other tool (like scummvm) for that.
How about the ones from early 2000s? Is Intel better for compatibility so I could have less crashes and not being able to run?
If you are seriously concerned about playing old PC Windows games just in general, built a dedicated retro machine. Modern PC hardware lacks the necessary drivers for XP, let alone Windows 98.
Otherwise I would recommend you look up compatibility info for some games you specificially like to play under the OS you are going to install. Graphics Cards or CPU type shouldn’t matter much for games from the early 2000s, and potentially problematic windows games are today often available via GOG, which fixes issues usually.
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