Etiido Uko Social Links Navigation News Contributor Etiido Uko is a news contributor for Tom's Hardware covering the latest updates in big tech and the PC industry. He is a mechanical engineer and senior technical writer with over nine years of experience in documentation and reporting. He is deeply passionate about all things engineering and technology, and is an expert in gadgets, manufacturing, robotics, automotive, and aerospace.
alrighty_then AI may accelerate the emulator improvement pace. Consoles are fast becoming locked-down PCs anyway. If you want the games to be around and playable for the long haul, getting them emulated is a good way to do that. Reply
Pierce2623 Written in C# instead of C++? For real? C# is a high level language that abstracts everything away and has fully automatic memory management and garbage performance compared to C++. It also basically runs in the equivalent of a VM called the .NET runtime. No wonder they’re only getting 60fps in super basic small games. Reply
palladin9479 alrighty_then said: AI may accelerate the emulator improvement pace. Consoles are fast becoming locked-down PCs anyway. If you want the games to be around and playable for the long haul, getting them emulated is a good way to do that. They've always been locked down Personal Computers. The NES was originally named the Family Computer in Japan. Reply
palladin9479 Pierce2623 said: Written in C# instead of C++? For real? C# is a high level language that abstracts everything away and has fully automatic memory management and garbage performance compared to C++. It also basically runs in the equivalent of a VM called the .NET runtime. No wonder they’re only getting 60fps in super basic small games. Petty much all modern development is done in HLLs and then the compiler does the rest. Most modern game engines now use c# for the development and then compile it into binary during build. Even leaving it in pure bytecode isn't slow like it used to be. JIT runtimes are now hella fast. Reply
JohnyFin AI will rip off everything soon. Just reminder: my 5090 is approx 8-10 times faster than Sony PlayStation 5. Not mention that my Intel 5.5 GHz is ripping of Sony CPU The developing of emulators accelerated. I suspect big troubles in next yeras for consoles. Reply
TerryLaze palladin9479 said: They've always been locked down Personal Computers. The NES was originally named the Family Computer in Japan. That was microcomputer not personal computer. It's a huge difference, PCs back in those days were unobtanium for the masses, the ibm 5150 of those days was 1,5k in back then money (that's like 5k today) . While now a PC and a console are basically the same price / you can make similar builds for a similar price. Reply
gamerk316 palladin9479 said: Petty much all modern development is done in HLLs and then the compiler does the rest. Most modern game engines now use c# for the development and then compile it into binary during build. Even leaving it in pure bytecode isn't slow like it used to be. JIT runtimes are now hella fast. Eh, C/C++ are still the preferred options when performance matters. Last I checked, the performance loss of C# relative to C/C++ was around 10% on average. Reply
bit_user palladin9479 said: They've always been locked down Personal Computers. The NES was originally named the Family Computer in Japan. PCs of that era had tens or hundreds of KBs of DRAM, even including Apple II variants of the time. By contrast, the NES and Famicom had just 2kiB of work RAM, 2kiB of video memory, and 0.25 kB of sprite memory. It was truly different-in-kind than what was classically considered a PC, even if Nintendo tried to pitch it as a kind of computer in Japan. The first time I considered a mass market console to be "basically a PC" was XBox, which included a hard disk, networking, and USB. Sega Dreamcast seemed like an important forerunner to it, since it ran a Windows kernel. I think Nintendo 64 also deserves an honorary mention, as it had a CPU that was at least capable of running a modern OS with memory protection. The Linux kernel still supports it, today. We could also talking about the Apple Pippin, but that seemed much more like a computer that was trying to be re-cast as a console, than the other way around. Reply
bit_user palladin9479 said: Petty much all modern development is done in HLLs and then the compiler does the rest. Most modern game engines now use c# for the development and then compile it into binary during build. Unity is C#-based, but Unreal Engine is C++-based. Big game publishers have their own engines, as well. Speaking of the PS5, specifically, its SDK directly supports C/C++ and PSSL (PlayStation Shader Language). Any use of higher-level languages to interface with the hardware therefore necessitates the use of an additional engine or unofficial language bindings. Source: https://generalistprogrammer.com/tutorials/playstation-game-development-ps5-sdk-guide palladin9479 said: Even leaving it in pure bytecode isn't slow like it used to be. JIT runtimes are now hella fast. I generally agree that JIT (or pre-compilation to a binary target) largely eliminated the difference between bytecode-based languages and C++, but I think @gamerk316 has an important point about the overheads of garbage collection. Also, the evolution of programming languages does not lead inexorably to garbage collection. Rust isn't garbage-collected. Reply
bit_user What I didn't see from this article is the specs of the machine they used to achieve this performance. The one place it referenced specs is when talking about a different emulator. BTW, I recently ran across a CPU instruction AMD still supports that Intel never adopted: clzero. I wonder if the PS5's compiler will generate that, because it could mean a small hiccup for executing on Intel CPUs. Granted, there are ways of dealing with such instructions, especially for emulators, but only the more intrusive options will avoid incurring a potentially non-negligible penalty. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/gaming-pcs/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/gaming-pcs/ps5-emulator-successfully-runs-six-titles-at-a-playable-60-fps-ps5-emulation-continues-to-gather-momentum-as-developers-improve-shader-translation-and-vulkan-support#main
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