Good CPU/GPU combination for emulators on Linux

[Zack]

During the last years, many emulators have appeared: cemu, yuzu, citra, rpcs3 and xenia.
I want to buy a low-budget PC that is able to run those emulators and 8th-generation PC games at full speed and resolution at 900p. Red Dead Redemption 2 is already 9th generation because the requirements are way high; the reference game is The Witcher 3. The PC should be durable for many many years.

DirectX is useless for Linux. OpenGL is important. 7 years ago, AMD had a terrible Open GL implementation. Nowadays It seems it is fixed, but their reputation is still bad. PCSX2 used to run better with DirectX 11 than with OpenGL, but it seems to be changed as well.

Intel graphic cards are weak. Dedicated graphic cards are expensive, requires a more expensive power supply unit and has short durability. For that reason, I will choose an AMD APU.

I will wait for the next AMD APUs because the current ones don't support Vulkan 1.2. Vulkan 1.2 has been released this year and includes many important features for implementing graphic APIs. That is very important for both console emulation and wine DirectX emulation.

If we ignore Vulkan, do you think Ryzen 5 3400G[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_microprocessors#cite_note-anand-r3000-apu-76][/url] is good for 7th-gen emulation and The Witcher 3?

[XXXBold]

I don't think you will get satisfying results for your gaming requirements using an APU, unless you're okay with probably 15-30 FPS, 720p and low details for new games.

The 3400G has an overhaul graphics performance like the NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030, which is pretty low end and not really useful for gaming, but for office PCs. That means, you will already struggle with a lot of PS2-Games, and PS3 emulation requires much more power, on CPU and especially GPU side.

I don't think there will be APUs available within the next few years which can serve your purpose, so there's no way around a dedicated GPU.