http://www.n4g.com/ps3/NewsCom-398141.as...1#Comments

Do u think the ps3 has enough horsepower to pull it off althoug i know the approach will be diff as compared to pcsx2

Dreamcast? yes.
PS2, well some of the older pstriples are backward compatibile with most ps2 games.

PS3's were only compat with the PS2 because...

They included an almost complete PS2 inside them.

The EE + GS labeled chip in your PS2? Original PS3s had one too! That's the only reason the PS3 was able to emulate the PS2 initially. Without that I strongly doubt the PS3's ability to emulate a PS2 correctly, at full framerates (note: of course some titles will, because they're easy, but presumably a Sony defacto emulator would need a much higher title compat/playability rate). The PS3 emulator will have the same problem we have: most of it's computational power will be neigh worthless because you can't scale emulation across multiple cores and retain proper emulation accuracy.

Edit: And if you just compare just the Cell's 3.2ghz core cpu against the 3.2ghz of a C2Duo, the C2Duo obliterates it in raw instruction throughput.

(10-17-2009 04:54 PM)Air Wrote:  PS3's were only compat with the PS2 because...

They included an almost complete PS2 inside them.

The EE + GS labeled chip in your PS2? Original PS3s had one too! That's the only reason the PS3 was able to emulate the PS2 initially. Without that I strongly doubt the PS3's ability to emulate a PS2 correctly, at full framerates (note: of course some titles will, because they're easy, but presumably a Sony defacto emulator would need a much higher title compat/playability rate). The PS3 emulator will have the same problem we have: most of it's computational power will be neigh worthless because you can't scale emulation across multiple cores and retain proper emulation accuracy.

Edit: And if you just compare just the Cell's 3.2ghz core cpu against the 3.2ghz of a C2Duo, the C2Duo obliterates it in raw instruction throughput.

PS3's only one core, 7 SPE's, so how'd that work?

* In practical terms the Cell CPU is actually a dual-core, not a single core. The low-level implementation is similar to HyperThreading, but it's more efficient so it's overall performance more closely matches a dual-core cpu.

* When I say the "core" of the Cell, I mean that unit and excluding the SPEs, since they're not really useful for about 80% of the work involved in emulation (they would, however, be very useful for texture swizzling and software rendering).

As far as I know the Cell is superscalar on top of hyperthreaded, so it can (in ideal conditions) push 4 instructions per cycle. The C2D in ideal conditions can push 6 instructions per cycle, and typically has less far less issues with memory latency thanks to clever out-of-order instruction execution. The C2Duo instruction sets typically need less instructions to do the same thing as the RISC-ish design of the Cell. Thus, comparing just the core units, the C2Duo wins handedly.

The PPE in the Cell is superscalar, the 7 spes are vector processors though.(unless you were just talking about the core like you said before) I always thought that the similarity of the ps2 and Cell could help out seeing how it is a vector processor and the VU0 and Vu1 are also, but the thing is they have to worry about the GS too now since before they didn't even have full emulation with just the GS on a chip without the EE. I remember asking this a little while ago, and there wasn't a clear answer, but now I guess the answer is no. They also simply said that they would have Ps2 games on psn, it doesn't mean that they will have a full featured emulator.

Oh, and also would the VMX instructions on the main Cell core halp out with emulation? King of like how The Core 2 has SSE2? I heard that VMX is more fully featured than SSE2.

And how does the Cell as a whole compare to a modern desktop cpu like the i7 in overall performance and in gaming performance? How does the main "dual" core compare to lets say a Pentium 4, Pentium 4 with hyperthreading or pentium D? Is the Cell worth all that Sony has been hyping it up to be? I remember people saying that in things like 3D rendering and gaming performance the Cell all in all beats even the i7. It does seem like that could be true since we see games like Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 made with the Cell and an old gpu that is just stronger than the 7800GTX with only 256MB of vram and system ram.I doubt that the i7 could do that, or maybe games are simply not designed on the pc to take advantage of the cpu for tasks that relate to 3d rendering because the gpus are already so powerful.

Also, do you think that the ps3 as a whole is stronger than the Xbox 360? Would the 360 be better suited to run a ps2 emulator? I heard someone saying that because the 360 has a more traditional design. The 360 cpu is basically 3 of the Cells main core PPE strapped together with added VMX 128 instructions and 1MB of lockable L2 cache.


Sorry if it seems like I'm inundating you with questions. I just wanted to get some of my main questions out to people who actually know what they are talking about instead of random fanboys on their specific system boards.

Where does it mention Dreamcast emulation in that link ?
I can only see reference to a tiny part where Sega may bring some of their older Dreamcast titles over to the PS3, but no mention of using emulation, unless I missed it somewhere.

I think Sony may be able to make a good PS2 emulator. Simply because they have more know-how than the PCSX2 authors (no offence here ) They have the entire coding and god-knows-what about the PS2 and PS3 there. However, being the money grabbing **** they are, they won't let you play your old PS2 games with the PS3. Instead they will sell them solely via PSN. Guess why Sony doesn't give us an application for converting your original PS1 games to PSP Eboot files, even though the PSP has a sony-made PS1 emulator on board. To convert YOUR PS1 games you need a custom firmware and 3rd party programme to convert it.

Enh, that just means some clever PS2 fanboi out there will come up with a way to convert your PS2 discs.