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Yeah that could be the case,although since in new versions more things get emulated (or get emulated more accurately) usually the speed goes down. Maybe when/if PCSX2 uses more than 2 cores you'll get the speed increase you need.
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Why do you say when/if? Isn't supporting in more then 2 cores is a something that the coders should aim towards? Then all the people with Quad Cores around here (and there are many, especially Q6600) will have 60 fps in most if not all games...
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Because that would need a huge rewrite of the whole emulator,and if not done properly it might even decrease the speed instead of increasing it,from the synchronization overhead. Of course,you are welcome to do it yourself if you think it's so simple. And you don't know what the speed would be after such a rewrite,but the '4 cores instead of 2 so double speed' is a myth,it would be at best around 20-30% increase.
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I believe I saw somewhere on the net that 4 cores showed 30 % performance increase relative to 3 cores and not 2. And 3 cores showed ~50 % performance increase relative to 2 cores. A simple calculation shows us that 4 cores vs 2 cores has a performance increase ~95 % (1.5*1.3). But seeing as I've lost the source and I might very well be mistaken I guess that really doesn't change anything.
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Also, if there aren't any more parts of the emulator that would benefit from becoming it's own thread, you will not see a speed increase no matter how many cores you want to code for.
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Well, I guess we'll just have to wait... It's not my highest priority to play PS2 games on my computer, so I'm not so disappointed from the fact I get 40FPS on GoW2...
Another question I wanted to ask, what is the difference between SSE2 and SSE4.1? Is it that big? What is that thing, anyway?
Ty to all.
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Those are instruction sets. Think of them as software for your processor, or maybe more accurately like firmware. It basically tells the processor how to process data. Different instruction sets either process data differently, or handle completely different types of data.
As far as PS2 emulation is concerned, SSE2 has all the basic stuff needed to process the kind of data the emulator uses, while the higher versions have extra instruction sets that either process things faster, or in completely different ways that are better for emulation purposes.
For some games, there can be a big difference between the different instruction sets, though about 80% of the time or so, you won't notice much of a difference in speed.
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So those instruction sets apply to every PC game as well? I mean, what are the other uses for the SSE2 or SSE41 or whatever?
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It doesn't matter since I don't have the source anymore, but the result came from benchmarking different games and applications on first two cores then three cores and last four cores. After that they processed the result and calculated the performance gain. Oh well, I don't really care since my quad core is more than enough for me.