I still have my PC with Core 2 Duo (not using it). The highest I would have tried to emulate was Playstation 1 back then, wouldn’t even think of trying PS2 emulator. Let alone the emulator wasn’t as good as it is now.
I’m pretty sure I got through persona 3 on that core 2 system. Either an e8400 or q6600. I swapped back and forth a couple times because turns out quad core wasn’t a straight upgrade at the time.
Mine is the e8400 and it has 2 cores (+2 hyperthreading). The q6600 has 4 (but no hyperthreading, I think). BTW I was thinking to upgrade to it back then. Off course it also depends on the GPU and RAM too. Did some research and found someone reporting with a similar setup I had (minus the CPU, as mine was e8400):
I’m trying to run as many (good) japanese PS2 games as I can on a computer that has an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2,40GHz, 8GBs RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD 5700 series, and to my surprise, I’m very limited by the number of titles that run more or less decently, when this PC hardly has a problem running most Gamecube games (with Dolphin), or Dreamcast (with Flycast) games I feed it. Heck, for what very few original XBox titles I more or less managed to run (with Cxbx Reloaded), they run better! Castlevania Curse of Darkness for example.
Now this bugs me even more, because I should have tried Dolphin and Flycast too. Would be fun to bring it out again and see what it still can do. But I’m not that bored enough to do that right now.
Dolphin was a pretty mixed bag at the time. I got through Xenoblade Chronicles on that system, but I remember one of the regions on the mechonis(?) would only do like 7fps at best, but other areas would do 20-30. But monkeyball worked pretty well, as did some of the other GameCube games.
But I was using that system when Sandy Bridge was already out, and still using it when Haswell came out, because I was a broke student. So the software may have been a little more developed than when you were messing around with it.
Also I don’t think the e8400, or any of the core 2 duo/quad cpu’s had hyperthreading. I know the Pentium 4 had it, not sure about the Pentium D
You are right, I misremembered it. The e8400 didn’t have hyperthreading. I guess the drawback of the q6600 with 4 cores was, it had lower speed at 2.4ghz compared to the 3ghz on the 8400. And that hurts a lot the single core performance, which is much more important for emulators. That’s why you had this back and forth between both CPUs. I also didn’t really understood all of that back then.
I still have my PC with Core 2 Duo (not using it). The highest I would have tried to emulate was Playstation 1 back then, wouldn’t even think of trying PS2 emulator. Let alone the emulator wasn’t as good as it is now.
I’m pretty sure I got through persona 3 on that core 2 system. Either an e8400 or q6600. I swapped back and forth a couple times because turns out quad core wasn’t a straight upgrade at the time.
Mine is the e8400 and it has 2 cores
(+2 hyperthreading). The q6600 has 4 (but no hyperthreading, I think). BTW I was thinking to upgrade to it back then. Off course it also depends on the GPU and RAM too. Did some research and found someone reporting with a similar setup I had (minus the CPU, as mine was e8400):- https://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-LIST-The-Most-CPU-Intensive-Games?page=12
Now this bugs me even more, because I should have tried Dolphin and Flycast too. Would be fun to bring it out again and see what it still can do. But I’m not that bored enough to do that right now.
Dolphin was a pretty mixed bag at the time. I got through Xenoblade Chronicles on that system, but I remember one of the regions on the mechonis(?) would only do like 7fps at best, but other areas would do 20-30. But monkeyball worked pretty well, as did some of the other GameCube games.
But I was using that system when Sandy Bridge was already out, and still using it when Haswell came out, because I was a broke student. So the software may have been a little more developed than when you were messing around with it.
Also I don’t think the e8400, or any of the core 2 duo/quad cpu’s had hyperthreading. I know the Pentium 4 had it, not sure about the Pentium D
You are right, I misremembered it. The e8400 didn’t have hyperthreading. I guess the drawback of the q6600 with 4 cores was, it had lower speed at 2.4ghz compared to the 3ghz on the 8400. And that hurts a lot the single core performance, which is much more important for emulators. That’s why you had this back and forth between both CPUs. I also didn’t really understood all of that back then.