Specs for RPCS3 in the future?

[Chalking Fenterbyte]

Noting that there has been tremendous progress (as with loading the first image from that game, whatever it's called, recently) beyond what most would've expected from this project several years ago, I am genuinely wondering if anyone is projecting or estimating the hardware and software requirements for when, theoretically, let's say, RPCS3 can run some commercial games and the like in full.

For example, PCSX2 had many crunching the numbers for specs required to run many commercial games, and while many of the guesses are "ball park guesses", some were right on (this was before the emulator ran all of the games it does now).

So, theoretically, what kind of hardware specs are or would be projected to run some commercial games on RPCS3 in the future?

8 + core CPU? Multi-GPU? 6 GHz + speeds, or high-end GPGPU work (minimum)?

I just want to hear peoples', especially the developers', opinions.

Lower-end game example:

Little Big Planet

Higher-end game example:

Final Fantasy X-III

Plus, I'm sure many of those dying to run commercial games on this emulator would love to have some numbers in mind when building their computers and/or optimizing for this, so I think this question is okay. As time goes on things will change, but this thread can always be updated as it follows along.

NOTE: I realize this isn't solely a concern in the low-to-mid stages of development that this emulator is still in, but for objective analysis, projective outlook, and ideas on its future requirements, wouldn't this help suffice the concern?

[Ekaseo]

its hard to say, companies come with new technologies every year, what we estimate now, can be totaly different the next year... i would leave that question when there is a recompiler and not a interpreter and when it runs some more games.

[ssshadow]

There is probably going to be a large difference between the requirements of Disgaea 3 (that one game that will soon display the intro video) which is mostly 2D and very basic 3D, and say FF XIII or GTA 5 which takes the real PS3 to it's absolute limits. I would say that Disgaea 3 could absolutely run on a powerful gaming PC from 2013-2014, that is i7 Haswell and a powerful GPU (GTX 780, R9 290x) when there is a working recompiler which will let us guess increase performance by a factor 10.

NekotekinaHito posted a screenshot where the intro video runs at about 4,5 fps. I have no idea what his specs are, but assuming a normal i5/i7 at around 3 ghz, that is 40-50 fps on a recompiler, hopefully. Now this is just a video, it could be heavier, or probably, lighter than in game stuff, but it is a rough estimation nonetheless.

My estimate is based on pcsx2 where I just tested the with Persona 4 on the laptop in my signature. The Sandy Bridge quad-core CPU with Hyperthreading was constantly in the range of 2,8-2,9 ghz.

Intro video:
Recompiler: 100-110 fps
Interpreter: 10 fps

In game 3D:
Recompiler: 140 fps
Interpreter: 12 fps

A PS3 emulator is not a PS2 emulator, but I think a factor 10 improvement is reasonable. But until the recompiler is done, there exists nothing that could play any commercial game at reasonable speed. And it should be repeated, this is talking about Disagea 3 which honestly looks like a PS2 game. For FF XIII or GTA 5? Nothing exists today that is fast enough, it would need to be yet another factor 10 faster than current consumer hardware I would say. Unless you do heavy hackery with multi GPU stuff that Alex was talking about. But this is very very far off, and inanely hard to do.

tl;dr, by the fastest hardware you can afford, probably spend extra on the CPU. But whatever you get, it will be outdated in several years when rpcs3 is even reasonable complete. Even though Disgaea 3 shows something, even a lot of simple homebrew doesn't yet.

[Chalking Fenterbyte]

Speaking of the interpreter, how is the dynarec going? (I haven't checked the source in a while.)

Also, what about a cached interpreter? I am still sticking by the ideal of some degree of lower-level emulation for the system, since some games will most likely never work without the accuracy of it(unless some major hack-around can be done through HLE).

[mixdix123]

What do you think guys would a rig like that be able to run GTA V on the emulator:
Motherboard: Supermicro X9QRI-F+ Motherboard
CPUs: 4 x Intel Xeon E5 4657L v2(2.4 GHz, 30MB Cache, 12 Cores, 24 Threads)
GPUs: 2 x Amd Radeon HD 7990 Crossfire with Mantle support
RAM: 128 GB RAM DDR3 (32 X 4 GB) @ 1866MHz
SSD: Samsung SSD 840 Evo 1TB (MZ-7TE1T0BW)

P.S Sorry, but I like to exaggerate when it comes to PC rig configuration

[Nekotekina]

33 Ghz (x10 multiple of original PS3's 3,3 Ghz) and >10 cores (PPU x2 + SPU x6 + RSX + supplementary).

[3V01988]

but cpu equivalent PC i3 i5 i7 PC?

lol, you don't have a clue :p, they can't even make a cpu that is fast enough for full ps3 emulation... you need like 10 Xeon E5's to be able to run this emu smoothly, because the clock is way too low... If that makes sense :p It has enough cores, but not the required Clock speed, if the RPCS3 will play commercial games like GTA V, it'll have to be streamlined to perfection... but let's talk again when we have 10 Ghz processors or some shit, and by that i mean when they are not overclocked to the max :p But when the graphene processors hit the market, it'll be easy as hell to emulate this :p Just don't think it'll be in time for the "finished" version of rpcs3 :p

[Ekaseo]

these are all speculations, maybe it will be lower then you expect, just when i see the new tech comming (mantle, TSX, possible OpenGL speedups (apparently 15x), DDR4 rams and many more i dont remember them atm) and what will we see even later, these are meaningless speculations to me.

[ssshadow]

Look at it like this: Whatever you buy now will be outdated when rpcs3 is ready for GTA V, so don't bother building some über rig with several Xeons, you would just waste your money. Build a fast but normal gaming rig and be happy with maybe simple games like the Diagaea series in maybe the near future.

[3V01988]

these are all speculations, maybe it will be lower then you expect, just when i see the new tech comming (mantle, TSX, possible OpenGL speedups (apparently 15x), DDR4 rams and many more i dont remember them atm) and what will we see even later, these are meaningless speculations to me.

They are not speculations tho :p, i think 10 yrs for the first graphene or phosphorene processor :p and it'll blow your mind, they won't just make a 6 Ghz processor but at least 10, and with additional cooling, well :p but the next gen of consoles will also be using this, it'll make for the most realistic gaming ever :p

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Look at it like this: Whatever you buy now will be outdated when rpcs3 is ready for GTA V, so don't bother building some über rig with several Xeons, you would just waste your money. Build a fast but normal gaming rig and be happy with maybe simple games like the Diagaea series in maybe the near future.

yep, by the time the emu is ready coding wise, it'll run all playable games at full fps, by then we will have new kinds of RAM, and even GPU standards :p It's a fun time to be alive for us geeks isn't it :p