Widespread GCN Emulation

[enbob89]

By when do you think the emulation of GCN games will be on the same level as that of n64?
By that I mean, being able to get complete, functioning games with only minor flaws and play them on your PC via an emulator.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, I don't know anything about GCN emulation.

 

[Clements]

Probably more than 3 years for the 3D titles. Computers are simply not fast enough yet, and all the current emulators are very early stages.

 

[spyro32]

Probably more than 3 years for the 3D titles. Computers are simply not fast enough yet, and all the current emulators are very early stages.

clements is right its gonna be a tough time emulating the gamecube :bouncy:

 

[Baraxander]

I agree with the emulators being at a very early stage. But I don't think that " computers aren't fast enough nowadays ". I know perhaps this is a lame perception I have, and i should have to agree with you just because the fact you have been involved in the emulation scene more than i will ever be. But n64 could be emulated almost glitchless and at constant full speed in UltraHLE with a Pentium II processor, and a Voodoo moster II.

So I made this comparisson betwenn what hardware was necessary for a pc to have in order to emulate a N64, and what i guess based on that a pc that is capable of emulating a NGC should have:

N64 specs vs. PC specs needed to emulate it ( UltraHLE / 1964-PJ64 )

N64 clock: 93.75 MHz

UHLE: PII 400 mhz / PJ64-1964: PIII/ Athlon-Duron 800 mhz aprox.

N64 Co-processor/Video: 64-bit RISC processor running at 62.5 MHz RCP SP (Sound and Graphics Processor) and DP ( Pixel Drawing Processor)

UHLE: Voodoo II / PJ64 - 1964 : a GForce 2 MX is way more than enough.

As a side note co-processors have been integrated in PC microprocessors long time ago, so no need to compare that.

N64 memory: Rambus D-RAM 36 Mbits

UHLE: 64 mb SDRAM is fine / PJ64 - 1964 : never tried using less than 128 mb SDRAM, with wich the emulator works great.

N64 audio: Stereo 16-bit/64 PCM channels sampled at 44.1 kHz

UltraHLE: standard Sound blaster 16 performed excellent / Pj64-1964: not really sure, but i never had trouble using integrated sound.

I made this difference because we all know about ultra hle compatibility issues, so we could give it a more realistic aproach.


And finally,let's move on to Gamecube specs:

ATI Flipper

• 162 MHz
• 4 pixel pipelines
• 4 texels per clock cycle (4 pixels with 1 texel per pixel)
• Maximum of 8 texture layers per rendering pass (done in 8 clock cycles)
• Bump Mapping
• 33 million polygons per second (peak)
• Subpixel Anti-Aliasing
• 33 million polygons per second (peak)
• 6 million to 12 million polygons per second

IBM Gekko CPU

• 485 MHz
• 32-bit integer
• 64-bit floating-point
• 64KB L1 cache (32KB instruction + 32KB data)
• 256KB L2 cache
• 1125 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS
• 1.94 GFLOPS


Well, for the processor part, it is more than obvious that any pc in the market at least cuadruples the speed and power of the NGC's cpu. In fact, gekko has a pretty big and respectable L2 cache and floating point, for a console.

I have to recognize that Flipper GPU is really powerfull for a console system. In any case, this part would be the painfull one talking about pc hardware required to emulate a NGC. Powerfull cores such as R350 ( Radeon 9800's one ) are still nearly duplicating that speed, with around 400 mhz clocked GPUs, double amount of pipelines ( x800 are cuadrupling that amount, with 16 pipelines :O ) and delivering around 412 M triangles/s.

So i think that having a Radeon 9600 and an athlon XP 2000+ should suffice any hardware demand from a gamecube emulator.

 

[Clements]

You need around 8-10 times the CPU speed for decent compatible emulation (i.e. an emulator with around 80% or more compatibility). The Gekko is PowerPC processor which is 64-Bit @485MHz, and is about as fast as XBox's 733MHz CPU overall which is a 32-Bit x86-derived processor.

Your probably going to need upwards of 5-6GHz or 3-4GHz dual core for 3D games once the emulator is fully optimised (dual core speed is provided the emulator is completely optimised for running on two cores). So GC emulation will become more possible once dual cores become widespread, since 6GHz isn't going to happen anytime soon since Intel can't hit 4GHz with Prescott without heat problems etc, and so are moving to dual core.

The Gekko is only about half/third the speed of a 2000+, so that's FAR too slow. That's 1FPS in Wind Waker slow. An AMD 2000+ isn't really good enough for Chankast and that has SSE optimisations. Chankast runs well on my 3200+, probably fullspeed (60fps) on most games. The GC is probably about twice as powerful as a DC, maybe more, so immediately this catapults the requirements to 4.4GHz single core or more. The graphics requirement is just a good DX9 card. Emulating the flipper at full speed is less consuming.

With dirty hacks and poor emulation (compatibility less than 40%), you could probably get it down a bit, but speculating on speed needed here is pointless really, since it depends on how well you can implement these hacks. With HLE, N64 emulation requirements went right down, but this may or may not be doable with the GC. If the N64 emulators were fully LLE, then the requirements would be closer to 10x in line with other LLE emulators such as ZSNES and ePSXe.

 

[Baraxander]

wow.. i greatly apreciatte your feedback.. that surely was mind opening... and painfull... 6 ghz dual-core processors.. ouch..

anyway, 6 - 8 ghz processors are projected to be available for 2006 so hopefully the cpu speed required to fully emulate a ngc would be out in 2 and not 3 years.

This really tells you how much consoles have evolved... If you make a retrospective, you would see that emulators were able to perform as good as their console partners when their market wasn't still dead, and games were still hitting the systems. Bleem, Ultrahle, Nemu and Psxe appeared long ago before playstation and nintendo 64 game production was dropped.

From what you are telling me we can't expect any emulator to perform the same way ngc does until at least 2006-2007, date when ngc will presumably be dead, since the next nintendo console would be out ( and I truely wish nothing but the best to the next N console, seeing how bad sales and reputation NGC got compared to PS2 and X-BOX )

 

[Clements]

You can play some games now at playable speeds like Crazy Taxi and Bust-a-Move 3000 with Dolphin Teaser, however these games do not use anywhere near the full power of the GC. Games like Rogue Leader and Metroid Prime will be the "Goldeneye 007s" in terms of system requirements since they use much more power of the GC. These are the games that will require that fast processor I suggested. Along the way though, a lot of the less complex games will be playable, probably before 2007. So don't lose hope just yet!

 

[LReyome27]

and by 2007, either most people will be able to afford the GameCube or the GameCube will have been "discontinued" by Nintendo, much like the N64 was discontinued 4 years after release

For the purpose of this post, discontinued means no new games coming out.