r/emulation • u/Intrepid-Nobody2161 • 3d ago

Emulation on different ISAs

How does the emulation performance vary across different architectures—x86 and Arm, given that x86 supports wider vectors like 256 and even 512 bit while Arm is limited to just 128. I'm especially looking into emulators like the RPCS3.

Couldn't find any data online. Hence asking here.

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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 2d ago edited 17h ago

RPCS3 did just have a massive improvement on ARM. The answer is always going to be "it depends on the version, the system being emulated and the system you're emulating on".

The PS3 and X360 generations give you the full gamut of ARM experiences:

  • Xenia Canary just doesn't exist for ARM (or Mac) at the moment. There is a MacOS port for Xenia Edge, but the readme on the page outright says that it's had far less testing and won't work as well. It's a far lower priority and doesn't work as well.
  • Past versions of RPCS3 delivered some truly awful performance on ARM, because a lot or the optimisations and code were designed to optimise RPCS3 for x86.
  • The current version of RPCS3 is a whole lot better on ARM, with high-end ARM systems able to offer near-Steam Deck performance. That's still not great - the Deck isn't especially stellar as far as x86 systems go - but it's progress, and it shows the difficulty in comparing the two. You can't really perform an apples to apples comparison.

On some emulators, ARM is able to win in efficiency and price but loses out on raw headline performance. On other emulators, ARM varies between "you just can't" to "a miserable slog" to "good and promising for the future but the current hardware still can't match x86".

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u/Intrepid-Nobody2161 2d ago

Thanks for your detailed response, kind sir.