Why to Emulators sometimes is less performing good than actual consoles?

[Dongwook23]

Why do games run worse on pc? I borrowed some wii u discs from my friend and gave those games a run. But when my portable switch can run it at 30FPS smoothly, why can't my fully fledged much more powerful pc can't handle 10FPS? Of course this is zelda breath of the wild we're talking about, a very demanding game but why it is so?

[Brooksie359]

2 minutes ago, Dongwook23 said:

Why do games run worse on pc? I borrowed some wii u discs from my friend and gave those games a run. But when my portable switch can run it at 30FPS smoothly, why can't my fully fledged much more powerful pc can't handle 10FPS? Of course this is zelda breath of the wild we're talking about, a very demanding game but why it is so?

because the game was meant to play on very specific hardware and is coded accordingly. also emulators tend to have some overhead involved too. bottom line is you are trying to run a game that is not meant to run on your hardware and it doesn't seem to like it. at least this would be my educated guess. 

[21rkosta]

because wii u emulators are not very developed considering the wii u is a fairly new console

[Drak3]

Because software emulation takes a while to get working correctly, and the emulator takes more resources to do its thing the further the target hardware is from your system's hardware (hence why x86 cannot emulate the PS3's Septacore Cell processor, unless you're running something like a 5960X, and even then, you can only play 1 or 2 undemanding early titlles).

 

[Dongwook23]

Well that makes sense. I would have loved to play breath of the wild in 4K but oh well. Mobile is the price to pay I guess.

[8uhbbhu8]

2 hours ago, Dongwook23 said:

Well that makes sense. I would have loved to play breath of the wild in 4K but oh well. Mobile is the price to pay I guess.

From what i've heard because of the way the game is done, when played through the emulator higher resolutions shouldn't actually affect the framerate much if at all due to how cpu limited BOTW is. 

 

Here's the source: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-the-cemu-emulators-devs-got-breath-of-the-wild-running-in-just-a-few-hours/

[HunterAP]

Emulation is basically converting the low-level code of a game system and translating it into something that another system can understand.

Imagine taking Windows and trying to run the entirety of Linux on it; it would take quite a lot of translating to convert one OS to entirely different one.

 

This is the same for games, except since games mainly focus on rendering a scene and projecting it onto a screen, you can imagine how intense it becomes to try to render frames when you're translating all that code. This is even more difficult when you have two totally different architectures, such as x86/x64 and ARM processors, but also incidentally can allow some emulators to run better (such as GameBoy running pretty well on the ARM architecture).

[noahdvs]

4 hours ago, HunterAP said:

Emulation is basically converting the low-level code of a game system and translating it into something that another system can understand.

Imagine taking Windows and trying to run the entirety of Linux on it; it would take quite a lot of translating to convert one OS to entirely different one.

 

This is the same for games, except since games mainly focus on rendering a scene and projecting it onto a screen, you can imagine how intense it becomes to try to render frames when you're translating all that code. This is even more difficult when you have two totally different architectures, such as x86/x64 and ARM processors, but also incidentally can allow some emulators to run better (such as GameBoy running pretty well on the ARM architecture).

Look up Linux Subsystem for Windows. Ubuntu Server also runs very well in a VM. Running the entirety of Linux isn't that bad. like you said though, it's the emulation of other architectures, especially if you have to reverse engineer a closed architecture like you have to in order to emulate most consoles.

[HunterAP]

19 hours ago, noahdvs said:

Look up Linux Subsystem for Windows. Ubuntu Server also runs very well in a VM. Running the entirety of Linux isn't that bad. like you said though, it's the emulation of other architectures, especially if you have to reverse engineer a closed architecture like you have to in order to emulate most consoles.

I was trying to explain it in a way that made sense in terms of operating systems, not just regular software. I run Ubuntu through VirtualBox and I know that it could run a billion times better if it was installed normally compared to using a VM. I'm taking a course where we built an assembler for some old computer from the 80's or 90's, and then adding in emulation of that computer system, and even with all the horsepower of modern machines we can still get hiccups. Maybe one day we can use quantum computers and emulate every console simultaneously at 4k 144 fps.