Are *future* system requirements likely to go up or down?

[theunlimited]

At the risk of annoying you with yet another system requirements question :innocent: :

Are future system requirements likely to go up or down?

This would interest me because my current system seems to be on a kind of threshold:

Core 2 duo T7200 2.0 Ghz
1GB RAM
Ati Mobility Radeon X1400

meaning I can play my FF-X relatively smoothly with 25-30 fps most of the time. Sometimes more but also sometimes less.

[jief]

requirement are likely to go up, since devs will be taking advantage of newer parts technology, for exemple 64 bits cpu or dx10 or even sse3. If they become necessary, people will have to upgrade their system to have these feature.
Oh, and it never hurts to have a lil extra firepower, does it? :p

[tuanming]

Expect quad-cores and Octo-cores optimized...in the future ;)

[theunlimited]

Yes, but notebooks are kinda hard to upgrade ^^ And this one is pretty new, meaning it won't be replaced for a few years.. Oh well tough luck...
Thanks for the reply!

[jief]

well, this emulator isnt really intended to be used on notebook, too long at full use of cpu isnt good for them :p

[NexXxus]

Yes, but notebooks are kinda hard to upgrade ^^ And this one is pretty new, meaning it won't be replaced for a few years.. Oh well tough luck...
Thanks for the reply!

ah not sooo hard.
i can change rams,hdd,dvd AND CPU of my acer travelmate 292 because it have socket 479 :)

[thc]

Actually I think Your notebook will be fine with PCSX2 for at least 1-2 years or so. I can't imagine ZeroFrog rewriting ZeroGS to DX10 just for few percent speed increase and quad core support is also unlikely to happen in close future.
(Your CPU is 64bit and has SSE3 so no worries about that ;)

[theunlimited]

@elitegamer I have a dell inspiron 6400. I think that the limiting factor is the graphic card, the only thing not (or very hard) upgradeable on notebooks. :(

@thc good to know :) My dell has a vista upgrade coupon, meaning i will have a 64-bit OS soon. I just hope stupid Vista doesn't nullify all 64-bit perfomance speedups :(

[Mkilbride2588]

Requirments are to go up? ...

The PS2 isn't that hardware intensive, at least from what I've seen and read.

Currently, I heard, that the low FPS is due to the emulator not able to perfect emulation yet, and, I would expect future versions to INCREASE your FPS and stability.

I have a 3.8GHZ processor, I havn't tried the PS2 emulator yet, but I'm pretty sure I have enough, my GFX card is a GeForce 6800 128 MB AGP X8, which may be outdated, but I think it's enough...

[Smooth Criminal]

requirements will grow for compatibility till a certain point and when high compatibility say 90% and above is achieved and all the problems are solved then the requirement will comedown.

but dont celebrate yet the requirements will go till a quad core i think but come down again to dual core at maximum performence or to an advanced single core or ht system like p4>>prescot<<

[jief]

keep dreaming if you think a prescott will be able to run the emu at full speed in the future :/

oh and mkilbride, its not about the ps2 being hardware intensive, its about emulating that hardware

and i also didnt say the emu will be using sse3 or 64bit cpu or or even dx10, i'm only saying it could do so

and now completly out of topic : omg kakashi's face :o

[Mookster]

requirements will grow for compatibility till a certain point and when high compatibility say 90% and above is achieved and all the problems are solved then the requirement will comedown.

but dont celebrate yet the requirements will go till a quad core i think but come down again to dual core at maximum performence or to an advanced single core or ht system like p4>>prescot<<

Do you have ANY idea how this kind of programming works? If not, please stop making inane comments.

[Smoky-]

all emus are slow in beginning. even N64 emulators sucked big time on my old machine. now they work at fullspeed on my old rig ;)

technology we currently have is way enough for ps2 emulation !
there is no need for quadcore crap, there isnt even need for dual core.
just wait and see.

FFX ist running with 20-25 fps on my A64 2800+ single core, 1 gig RAM and 6600GT
and this is the first working version of this emu which can run games without massive bugs.
remember that intels core duo is 3-4 times faster than mine ;)

my guess is, they will add required features to correctly display games first. after that they will optimize for speed.

[CKemu]

Hilarious, never before have I seen such a marvelous demonstration of idiocy and wishfull thinking, hell are half of you even aware that the cumulative speed of the PS2's CPU's is over 1.2GHz?

That the emulator has already pushed the bounds of what we can squeeze down current generation PC technology, hell we're even moving on to 64bit recompilation to try to make these current machines handle PS2 emulation better.....

I love the way people throw around the word "optimize", do you even know what can be optimized in the emulatror, have you even programmed in your lives?

[tuanming]

...do you even know what can be optimized in the emulatror

I can name a few thing that need to be optimized SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, SSSE4...and more cores that all i can think of for now. Oh, yes maybe one more XD better optimize coding for Pcsx2 ;)

[par]

unless someone has a specific idea for speeding up pcsx2 (as in, name the function in the source that you're planning on rewriting / replacing / etc.), there's little point in idle speculation about how much faster it could get "if only the devs bothered."

its recompiler is already as advanced or more advanced than any other console emulator, it already uses 3d hardware, it can't use physics accelerators.. there is just very little short of the 64-bit build or writing game-specific hacks that can make it faster right now.

or, if someone has a specific idea as to how to speed it up, go ahead and post it. this could be (yet another..) good thread for dispelling some myths about pcsx2's speed.

[ザトニス]

Hilarious, never before have I seen such a marvelous demonstration of idiocy and wishfull thinking, hell are half of you even aware that the cumulative speed of the PS2's CPU's is over 1.2GHz?

Uh oh. Instead of giving a straight up answer you start by throw an insulting and even arrogant response. Be reasonable; while there's probably a fair few individuals who know their stuff, most people don't. Laugh. It's hilarious. Yeah, right. It's common. And to answer you, no, I had no idea the cumulative speed of the PS2's CPU is over 1.2GHz. I don't think it unreasonable to believe that the majority of those who own the system are aware of that figure either. Gee; hilarious.

That the emulator has already pushed the bounds of what we can squeeze down current generation PC technology, hell we're even moving on to 64bit recompilation to try to make these current machines handle PS2 emulation better.....

Getting better. You should have started with this and expanded.

I love the way people throw around the word "optimize", do you even know what can be optimized in the emulatror, have you even programmed in your lives?

... but you're back on your "people can be so ignorant it's funny" tangent. You need to recline.

As for me, I think it's only natural for better tech to be utilized as it's made available. I do hope that there might be the possibility of improving performance on the less than high range end, but it already runs so well that I don't know how it could happen.

[Mookster]

Can you blame him? Try giving the same 'straight up' answer hundreds of times while every Tom, ****, and Harry pretends they know all about optimizing functions.

Edit: Uh, wow, the shortened form of Richard is censored. Kind of hurts the expression.

[psycoboy28]

I think for people with core 2 duo systems, the games will only play more and more smoothly when all is said and done.

SSE3 doesn't really do much, but if I remember right, SSE4 is 128bit registers which run parallel to the clock (aka, one 128bit instruction per cpu tick), so the 128 bit registers on the PS2 should be able to get done a wee bit faster.

64bit optimized code won't really accelerate the code very much, maybe looking at a 10% gain there. (2-3 fps)

Those of you that keep hoping everything will run at 100% speed on a P4, or athlon xp/64, are just dreaming though. Not going to happen.

Heck, I doubt even the 5000+ amd's will ever run this emu full speed.

Just my take on things, been programming on and off for about 8-9 years.

[Smooth Criminal]

Do you have ANY idea how this kind of programming works? If not, please stop making inane comments.

hilarious huh,i have been watching emus from the bleem series brother i know how they are developed and what is the path for developing them

its like this
1.make enough powerful h/w for the emu
2.raise the compatibility and remove random glitches
3.try to bring down the speed requirement and by saying Prescott i meant an hardcorely over clocked one , u people will i have to say everything in detail??:angry::angry::angry:

also there was a big or in middle of the two sentences

this is not only for mogster but for all the people here except ckemu

[Smoky-]

"i'm old, i saw many things, all things in future are same"...as usual in my life i noticed people saying that who are the biggest looser.
they just need a point to be "good" in it, defending theyr oppinion no matter how wrong they are :x
well those wise guys even know things and don't need to try first.

but who cares, i still play ps2 games on my ps2...can't you too? is that the point why people are going crazy in forums?

[Smooth Criminal]

"i'm old, i saw many things, all things in future are same"...as usual in my life i noticed people saying that who are the biggest looser.
they just need a point to be "good" in it, defending theyr oppinion no matter how wrong they are :x
u call me a loser... man i consider this as an insult

[tkSteveFOX]

Wow you guys are really fighting it out there!!If you just stick to specs the entire PS2 can`t even compare to a X1600 GPU or a 7600 one.Just the GPU is far more faster than the entire PS2 system if you happen to read that a current
mid range GPU is about two times faster than the Fastest CPU out there.Cause it handles far more instructions than the CPU.THis is hadware whoever says im not right is so out of his line that he doesn`t even see the line.About two years ago a university tested a 5950 gpu as a CPU and they figured that it`s performance is about that of an P4 running at 10ghz(im talking about the old s478 P4)a X1600 is what 4-5 times faster than the 5950
so that makes it 40ghz.Now you can`t tell me that the PS2 cpu is equivalent to that.SOny said that the EMotion Engine is three times fastere than the P3 chip.The EE is made out of 43milion transistors compare that to about 300 milion X1950XTX or the Conroe processor that it`s made out of more than a 100milion transistors.But thats just hardware talking.Software is the big deal i`m shure that in time we can play all the PS2 games on a simple single core 2ghz CPU with a VG above 9500 and 6200.I don`t mean to offend you guys you`re doing a great job.But as someone sayd that when you reach full speed of the emu you`ll shurely try to enhance the games vision compare PSone to EpsxE 1.6 with the latest plugins the games look amazing i`m shure that will be the case with the PCSX2 in a couple of years.

[Smooth Criminal]

very informative post indeed .

[par]

Software is the big deal i`m shure that in time we can play all the PS2 games on a simple single core 2ghz CPU with a VG above 9500 and 6200.I don`t mean to offend you guys you`re doing a great job.But as someone sayd that when you reach full speed of the emu you`ll shurely try to enhance the games vision compare PSone to EpsxE 1.6 with the latest plugins the games look amazing i`m shure that will be the case with the PCSX2 in a couple of years.

you're not grasping the problem. you're just looking at mhz and transistors, when it's actually about things like intruction set architecture, floating point exceptions and synchronization overhead.

only analogy i can think of:

"my car has a 100 horsepower engine! therefore it should be able to eat as much grass as 100 horses!!!"

there's more going on inside pcsx2 than you understand. when the development team says they can't get it much, if any, faster, you should listen to em.

[flowrent]

You don't make an emulator with numbers you read on the Internet . Your post is useless we already know Pcs are more powerful than Ps2 .But Ps2 "speaks a different language " and it's really hard work to translate into something a Pc can understand .

[Mookster]

"you're not grasping the problem. you're just looking at mhz and transistors, when it's actually about things like intruction set architecture, floating point exceptions and synchronization overhead."

Thank goodness! A sensible, intelligent post at last!

[Coolsvilleman]

You don't make an emulator with numbers you read on the Internet . Your post is useless we already know Pcs are more powerful than Ps2 .But Ps2 "speaks a different language " and it's really hard work to translate into something a Pc can understand .

See now thats something even computer illiterate people can understand. Thats what should have been said in the beginning.

I think a major problem with people vs PCSX2 is that although they may know how to program, PCSX2 is such a large and undocumented program that it would take too long to understand how each part works and then optimize it. That makes it very difficult for anyone except the main coders of the program to comment on future speed and compatibility. CKemu, who works closely with the developers, has already stated that as much of the code has been optimized for older processors as possible. There may be a few more tweaks and such but nothing to get the 50-75% speed boost most people would require for there old hardware. People need to stop saying how they think pcsx2 should perform and start listening to the people that develop it about "how" it performs.

[TheDemonClown20]

you know, there's probably some undiscovered Rain Man of a computer genius out there who took the 0.9.2 source code, changed one letter or number somewhere and has a perfectly running PS2 emulator :rotflmao: (i know, that's next to impossible - hence its status as a joke)

you guys rule for even making it this far :bow: :bow: :bow:

[General Plot]

Not to mention that no matter what the PS2 uses natively in terms of power, under emulation, the requirements go up exponentially. You can't run it at 1:1 when emulating, it just doesn't work that way. Some people will just never comprehend the techology behind what is making this happen.:rolleyes:

[ChankastRules]

It would be nice if people who "knew" or at least had the slightest idea about what they were talking about replied. The question itself was not that stupid though.

[psycoboy28]

I think a good thing to consider as well is that even the programmers of this emu are kind of in the dark as well. They have no way of being able to tell the performance enhancements of next generation hardware, or even top of the line current hardware, since it is always changing.

One day AMD is on top (AMD 5000+), the next day we find out core-2-duo is about 3-4 times faster. Not to mention that, there is not a programmer in the world that can tell you, without a reasonable doubt, the performance enhancements of things like sse4. (though, things can be somewhat speculated)

I think something everyone should understand though, is that measuring things with just Ghz, and transistor counts is a thing of the past. Even with computers compaired with just themselves, let alone consoles. Things would be more accurately described by performance per watt anymore. My 2.0 ghz core duo is about 6 or so times faster then my athlon xp 2.2ghz, just as an example.

On the bright side, a programmer is like an RPG character. Through time, he learns more "powerful" code. Like being able to use pure assembly for something. And once he has that code snippet, that "optimization" is always there for him. So on and so forth. So, eventually, this emu will be faster on current top of the line systems.

Now, it really is hard for a programmer to take someone elses work and just start whipping out changes. Even as long as I have programmed I look at the source for pcsx2 and think, jesus, its like coding the dictionary in there. No way for anyone to speed up this process except for sit and wait for these talented programmers to do the job they set out to prove that they could do.

I think one of the big reasons they don't like speculating is that if they overestimate themselves publicly, they would get bashed constantly by some nonsense losers trolling the forums. Not only that, but it would bring a sense of being expected to do something, when really we should prevent these stresses on the people making this software.

Programming an emulator is a COMPLEX process. The old quote about someone being a rocketscientist is a thing of the past. Heck, a rocket engine only has 1... yes 1... moving part. We're talking about backwards engineering, trial and error, reading rediculously lenghtly documents, and other things as well.

Usually, an emu takes about 10 times the overall gusto of the original system requirements at first. (remember when snes9x required 500mhz computer?)

Once optimized, this usually goes down to about 3 times the overall power of the original system. (zsnes is all assembly, 66mhz dx2 required i think).

This is because in its purest form, an emu still has to...
1. Read the program.
2. Figure out what to do.
3. Do it x86 style rather then the native code.

and yes, this is ignoring the chronologious symetry inherent to ps2. So really, the ps2 emulator will always require a bit more then 3 times the power.

but.... enough said.

[tkSteveFOX]

i said in my post thats just hardware talking i told that the differance is the software wich i ment intruction.The EE is misc4 subset instructions it pushes more floating power than the original P4 but thats it.I didn`t say programing is easy or that the team isn`t doing a great job i think someone didn`t bother to read the entire post.I saw the guys talking about hardware and i thought i`d enlighten them in a few things.And then i said that hardware doesn`t matter that much in the end.And i sayd that that will happen in a couple of years not now.Cause they will release a faster and easier version of C++ next year that can make coding more faster and that will help too.Don`t forget that not only hardware is evolving but software as well.

[tuanming]

I think this thread is no longer needed...since the answer is pretty obvious. Newer technology/hardwares will improved Pcsx2 and of course run faster (Core 2 is proof ;)) If you still used same hardwares within the next 2-3 years then you won't gain much improvement over the Pcsx2 (unless pcsx2 release a version that is very near completion) but newer hardwares (Cpu, rams, motherboard, etc.) will take advantage of it.

[burekpita]

i think the rquirements are to increase as better pc hardware becomes avaible. one example is the pete's ogl2 plugin for psx emulation.

[runawayprisoner]

Yep... new technology... and something else I haven't heard anybody mention in the last 2 pages and that is... you could overclock your hardware to gain a tad bit 5-10% of speed. Well... actually... a bit higher than that in my case. My Celeron D 352 could actually handle FFX at a pretty solid 50-60FPS rate with VUSkip on. It only drops to about 30FPS when there are a lot of 3D models around but... it happens in every game I have on my computer anyways. That could be due to the 512MB of DDR2 RAM that I have not the budget to afford an upgrade.

Edit: I could be wrong though but this at least proves one thing... you could still squeeze something else out of the single core generation and still achieve acceptable emulation of the PS2.

[emwearz]

Emwearz theory of Emulation (Though not the best)

Imagine a PS2 is Japanese person and your computer speaks English. Lets say for arguments sake you can both speak/listen to 30 words in 10 seconds. If the Japanese person (your PS2) started talking in Japanese to you sure you would hear what he was saying but you wouldn't understand it, you would have to look up every word and translate it into English and that would take alot longer than than 10 seconds to to understand each of those 30 words, if your lucky you might get 1 in that 10 seconds...

Lame example, but I tried.

[wwe_72]

PS2 emu is slow too cuz the BIOS (Basic Input Output System a.k.a PS2 OS)is locked and that gets the emulation hard and PCSX2 have to emulate PS2 directly from the files of the games something like this according what i've heard and guys forget about never the emu comunnity will have emulator that can emulates perfect the console that is created for we even don't have finished emu for Playstation and i can tell ya that maybe we are defeated cuz we can't compete with the real scientist from Sony or Microsoft they have very high-tech PCs and technologies that we can't imagine maybe and they are studied special for this and they create the consoles that are on the market today and everytime is gettin harder and harder in XboX the problem is not for interest is just cuz no1 can emulate that console is too hard and N2VA is poor documented and there was several attempts to be emulated but non of them was successful and what now they are dead and no1 even thinks to emulate X360 for that moment XboX defeat us we can't emulate him Playstation everytime is gettin' more complex and complex and i don't want to imagine when PCSX3 will be finished maybe in 2020 cuz PCSX2 is still not finished and there are long way to go with every new release of PCSX2 the requirments to me are gettin lower and lower cuz there are being added to the emu new thinks,plugins etc. and they are gettin newer proccessors,Video Cards,Motherboards and newer PC tech on the market

[runawayprisoner]

You may want to include a period or two in your post... I ran out of breath before the second line... :P
*cough* Anyways, don't you think it's time to stop the discussion? Also, XBox360 and PS3 graphical capabilities are getting owned by Nvidia's latest G80 graphics chips. The PS3, if it is exactly how it is according to Sony's and IBM's theories and estimations, could somehow make up for the loss of power and somewhat surpass the prowess of the G80 (ONE G80. SLI G80 totally neglects the logic of performance) but the XBox360 stands no chance against such fancy madness for Microsoft did the CPU alone (While Sony and IBM and some other biggies ganged up to force the Cell engine into existence) and the GPU is not really that much faster than the infamous GeForce 7600GT in terms of power (it has more RAM and all but the fill rate is still lower than 7600GT in fact. The additional eDRAM did help a lot but it's still bottlenecked by the GPU fill rate).

[General Plot]

Definitely time for an end. Plain answer: in most cases, as emulation gets more accurate, requirements are more likely to go up than down. Bottom line is no amount of speculation will change anything. There's no way to know what the final requirements will be until the project is finished.;) Closed.