What spec would you recommend?
My current pc is ancient from 2012, AMD x2 435, 6gb Ram, 5570 1gb Graphics Card.
I have had the N64 emulation running well, but now i get under 30fps and the games are unplayable, for some strange reason.
The faster the CPU you can afford, the better. AMD’s new CPU’s that were just released are currently the fastest.
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It was always my understanding that “Single Threaded Performance” was the best indicator for how well an emulator would perform. This lead me to the exact PassMark site listed here. At the time (September 2015) an Intel i7-4790-k (the k is important in that distinction) was at or near the #1 slot for Single Threading.
That in mind, I have never noticed slowdown on any cores I’ve thrown at this thing. Now, you’ll also want to keep in mind if you plan on using emulators like PCSX2, RPCS3, Cemu, Xenia, etc etc (ie. ones that are leveraging the GPU - pretty much anything from the year 2000 and later) That a ‘decent’ GPU is a good investment as well.
Decent is obviously a relative term, for me I have an RX 590 which is more suited for PC gaming, but it’s hardly a high-end card. Comparatively though I have an R5 240 in a smaller PC I sometimes use and the few PS2 games I’ve tested on that work ok.
It’s hard to nail down, but (to return to butanebob’s comment) CPU is going to be key in emulating most anything RetroArch would be used for.
I believe there is also some ‘minimum’ cpu requirements listed on PCSX2’s page and Mednafen’s saturn page that can point you in the right direction. I bought my smaller PC based off that and I think it’s an i5 6-series CPU and it works well.
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I wondered about this single core thing as well. It certainly used to be the case as these old emulators were written at a time when only one thread existed. But RA is surely optimized for multi thread, at least when applying shaders and such if not by the core? I guess which driver you use in RA has an effect as well. Using vulkan uses your video card right? And using D3D will just use CPU and RAM? I am unclear about the differences but this was my understanding. All the new emulator’s will have optimizations as well. So it may just be a little more important these days.
Video cards are another story. Never have too much power IMO LOL.
I recomedn as much power PC that you can get. Here is example:
@butanebob intel cpus are overall a superior choice for emulation since most emulators are looking for single thread performance.
Half people say AMD are now better. Other half says intel are still better. And right in the middle is me, not knowing what CPU to finally get.
Looking at some benchmarks the $299 5600X looks like the current price to performance king. It even matches or beats the 10900k in certain games like Flight Sim and RDR2, despite having four less cores. And at only 65 watt TDP. Probably can’t get it for retail price yet though.
I stand corrected, it seems amd has now the 4 top single thread performers atm : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html