PS3 Emulation loves Alder Lake, but it doesn't like Intel's E-cores
Published: 19th November 2021 | Source: RPCS3 | Author: Mark Campbell
RPCS3 declares Intel's Alder Lake CPUs the best processors for PS3 Emulation - But there's a catch
When compared to Intel's i9-11900K, Intel's i9-12900K can boost the performance of God of War: Ascension by up to 10 FPS when both CPUs are clocked at 5.2GHz, boosting framerates from 68 FPS to 78 FPS.
Wait, there's a catch
While Alder Lake provides the best performance when emulating games with the RPSC3 emulator, this is only the case when gamers disable Alder Lake's E-cores. This means that i9-12900K users would need to disable their CPU's eight Gracemont cores to enable maximised emulation performance. If RPCS3 users don't do this, they are "leaving a lot of performance in the table."
Disabling Alder Lake's E-cores allows Alder Lake processors to support AVX-512 instructions, a feature that is incredibly useful for enabling fast and accurate hardware emulation. A lot of PlayStation 3 instructions can be emulated quickly using AVX-512. This feature alone is why Intel's 11th Gen and 12th Gen Rocket Lake and Alder Lake processors can deliver the highest possible performance in emulators like RPCS3.
Hold on, AVX-512 is useful for emulation?
While Alder Lake's inability to support AVX-512 when its E-cores are enabled is an issue, the limited AVX-512 support on Intel's 12th generation processors is not considered a major problem by most users. Simply put, most applications do not use AVX-512, making AVX-512 seem like wasted silicon by many hardware analysts.
For emulators, AVX-512 can be used to accelerate specific instructions that would otherwise be slow to emulate. With AVX-512, what would otherwise take multiple clock cycles could be shortened to a single clock cycle, enabling a massive performance boost on supported systems. With AVX-512, emulators can deliver fast and accurate emulation for many instructions, both of which are desirable qualities for modern emulators.
With their future hybrid x86 processors, Intel needs to support AVX-512 instructions while their E-cores are enabled. If they cannot do this, AVX-512 will not be adopted widely by developers. AVX-512 is useful, but developers won't use it unless a majority of processors support it.
It has been speculated that AMD plans to support AVX-512 instructions with future Zen series processors, a move that the emulation community would likely praise. Perhaps AMD's Zen 4 processors would become the best RPSC3 chips if AMD supported AVX-512, though that remains to be seen.
You can join the discussion on RPCS3 declaring Alder Lake as the best CPU architecture for PS3 emulation on the OC3D Forums .
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19-11-2021, 14:44:44
Bagpuss
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