Pi4 Hardware Powerful?

[tdelios]

Just getting an opinion from all of you if the Pi4 hardware is powerful enough to support game consoles that were released in the early 2000s .. such as PS2 & PS3 ??

[paradadf]

@tdelios that‘s just ridiculous. Don‘t get me wrong, but it is just ridiculous to expect a Pi4 (35 $ computer SoC) to run such emulators if a Pi3 struggles with n64, dreamcast, saturn and suchs.

[tekkenism]

While Raspberry Pi 4 having a huge GPU boost (Broadcom VideoCore VI), it will easily (and almost perfectly) emulate PS1, Dreamcast, N64, and even perhaps PS2.

[voljega]

@tdelios yeah it will also emulate PS4 and even PS5 for one tenth of their price

[gkralicek2]

@tdelios Being realistic, Pi4 perf should be close to the one of Odroid XU4. Even if it'll certainly help improving the experience with emulators such as Dreamcast, N64, PSP or Nintendo DS (which often struggle to run properly with all games on Pi3B+), there is no way Pi4 will be able to run consoles such as PS2 or PS3 which require an awful load of power to be emulated properly (both GPU and CPU-wise). Even expensive PC-based configs got problem running them the right way so don't expect a simple Pi to do the job. Same goes (to a lesser extent though) for some other power greedy emulators such as Gamecube (which runs awfully slow on an Odroid XU4), Wii or even Saturn which are far from running smoothly on an XU4 :=((
Pi4 is a logical evolution of the current Pi platform with some substantial hardware improvements that's a fact, but thinking of Pi4 as the ultimate retro-gaming platform that will literally run every emulator and crush all the other existing concurrents on the market is, and will remain for some time, a sweet dream :=))... At least that's my opinion...

[tdelios]

@paradadf

I was using PS2/3 as an example..

Are there any consoles you are envisioning that would work with Pi4 that were placed on the back burner with 3B+ due to hardware speed compatibility?

[paradadf]

@tdelios well, the consoles you used as example are very unsuitable. And I suspect only some troublesome console will run (a bit) better, no magic can be done.

[Quemandoacromo]

This:

• VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x

I think there will be an improvement in the following emulators:

• n64
• dreamcast
• playstation (beetle-hw)

All require GLES 3.x for full support

Will this affect Recalbox in the future?:

• Buster will release with a 32-bit userland, as backwards compatibility for all previous models is important. The Pi 4 kernel uses LPAE but eventually we'll ship a 64-bit kernel.

PS: Possibly more performance in MAME with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM (i think)