According to @RPCS3 on Twitter, Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs are among the finest CPUs available for PS3 emulation right now. The Core i9-12900K is roughly 15% quicker than the previous-gen Core i9-11900K in a test displaying God of War: Ascension on the Open-Sourced Playstation 3 Emulator and both these processors ran at 5.2 GHz. Still, Kratos deserves even better.
To make the comparisons as fair as possible, RPCS3 deactivated all of the 12900K’s E-cores and enabled the AVX-512 instructions set, which the Open-Sourced Playstation 3 Emulator may use. Both processors were also overclocked to 5.2 GHz and had HyperThreading deactivated.
With these upgrades, the 11900K was able to produce 68 frames per second in Gold of War: Ascension, whereas the 12900K increased that frame rate to 78 frames per second, a difference of 10 frames per second or 14% in performance.
Unfortunately, with the E cores active and AVX-512 disabled, @RPCS3 does not show emulation performance on the 12900K. Because this is the default Alder Lake arrangement, it would be quite fascinating to know. It would also be fascinating to observe how big of an impact AVX-512 has on this PS3 emulator.
according to another Twitter post from @RPCS3, disabling the E cores does give Alder Lake processors better performance in its PS3 emulation utility owing to AVX-512 support, When the E cores are enabled but AVX-512 is disabled, “a lot of performance is left on the table.”
It looks like the Open-Sourced Playstation 3 Emulator makes sufficient use of AVX-512 to significantly improve gameplay performance. AVX-512 support should be enabled for anyone who does a lot of PS3 emulation, despite sacrificing the efficiency cores’ increased multi-threaded speed.
