WYP
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RX Vega GPU Bargains from £299 in Early Black Friday Madness
- Thread starter WYP
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Daiyus
Member
I've emulated on an A10-8600k and on my current Ryzen 5 + Vega 56 rig. I've got games from various consoles running no problem. I can't argue that Nvidia is probably still better for those kind of workloads, but saying is AMD is "useless" is somewhat disingenuous.
The point is, whenever there is a problem with 3D rendering in an emulator, its always on an AMD card because of their 3rd rate OpenGL driver.
..That and the fact that just about all emulator authors develop them on Nvidia GPU's themselves.
If you're heavily in to emulating the likes of PS2, Gamecube & WiiU, going down the AMD route will give you headaches that you wont have to deal with on a Nvidia card.
Daiyus
Member
Which is why you buy the hardware to suit your needs, but there's a far cry between saying "Nvidia is better for emulation workloads" and "AMD is useless for emulation workloads".
I'm in no way saying AMD is better here. It's pros and cons like always. I just don't like it when people say extreme statements that are not true. AMD are more of a headache for emulation, but they are not useless as my personal experiences testify.
Dolphin works great on AMD cards with the Vulkan render and the DirectX one always worked well if a few percent slower than NVidia under OpenGL. WiiU is different because there's only a single early closed source emulator out there that so far only really has a relatively sketchy OpenGL implementation (The developer worked exclusively on NVidia hardware and relied entirely on user feedback for debugging the AMD side of things until quite recently). The Vulkan rendered should be a big step up.
While AMD did essentially stop support & development of OpenGL drivers years ago, it is essentially a deprecated technology, and they mostly did it to refocus on Vulkan. Many of the better supported emulators are making the jump to Vulkan, not just because it allows better accuracy & timing but reduces CPU latency & load while offering wider modern support.
While AMD did essentially stop support & development of OpenGL drivers years ago, it is essentially a deprecated technology, and they mostly did it to refocus on Vulkan. Many of the better supported emulators are making the jump to Vulkan, not just because it allows better accuracy & timing but reduces CPU latency & load while offering wider modern support.
Greenback
Active member
Makes it sound like it's more outdated emulators than an AMD thing
To be fair, emulators can be very complex beasts (Particularly if you're having to reverse engineer proprietary components with little to no public documentation on their functionality, like most GPUs, which is why some people think CEMUs developer could have had access to non-public info as their closed-source implementation of AMDs GPU in that machine(The only major new emulation challenge given the CPU architecture had remained pretty constant since the GameCube) came around quite quickly quite well) and since the legality side of things means they're almost always free (Though CEMUs developer did find quite a fair & clean solution to that with the Patreon system), they rely mostly on very passionate & experienced people to spend a good chunk of their time on them.
So even PCSX2, which still has active development, has said they're not going to support Vulkan any time soon, because targeting low-level APIs is in itself a massive feat on top of all that and they just don't have the resources or people for it, and that's kinda fair enough. But then of course upcoming emulators like PCSX3 get a bit of a fresh start(And the added complexity likely makes the overhead of using high-level APIs impractical).
So even PCSX2, which still has active development, has said they're not going to support Vulkan any time soon, because targeting low-level APIs is in itself a massive feat on top of all that and they just don't have the resources or people for it, and that's kinda fair enough. But then of course upcoming emulators like PCSX3 get a bit of a fresh start(And the added complexity likely makes the overhead of using high-level APIs impractical).
AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
Great deals. That Vega 56 makes the new RX 590 seem like terrible value. On OCUK, the ASUS RX 590 Strix is more expensive than the ASUS Strix Vega 56! I'd love to replace my GTX 1080 with a Vega 64 so I can have Freesync again. I wish these prices were here a year ago. Vega would have been a great buy.
