How does PPSSPP perform so well?

[[Unknown]]

There are many reasons why PPSSPP performs well:

1. A lot of time has been spent optimizing it for much weaker devices than yours.

We've spent a lot of time trying to make it run on weaker devices, like mobile, which means a desktop like yours is a wonderland for it. Of course, there's always more improvements to make.

2. The PSP is just the right balance between modern and ancient.

Older devices than the PSP (including very much the PS2) make it a lot easier for games to rely on hardware quirks. These have to be emulated, which can make things a lot slower.

Newer devices are more complex, and tend to have a lot more concurrency. In some ways this is good, but emulating it accurately enough that games work properly again comes with a speed penalty.

3. The base resolution is pretty low.

PSP games render 42.5% as many pixels as PS2 games. What this means is that 10x PSP is less than half as demanding as 10x PS2 would be on your hardware.

4. The PSP is a mobile device.

On a console, whether you use 100% of the processing power or 50%, there's no real difference. On a mobile device, using 50% means the battery lasts longer.

This doesn't always mean games are more optimized, but sometimes they are. PSP games actually usually run 25% slower than on a PS2 (although the PSP is capable of 10% faster than the PS2), which means emulating it is at least 25% less demanding on the CPU level, usually.

5. We use some magic tricks.

Some of the things we do to optimize memory access, reduce jit codesize, etc. have been very carefully designed. Not all of them are even possible in a PS2 emulator due to differences in the hardware. The pcsx2 team know about the tricks that could work for PS2 emulation, but don't think they'll help much.

6. The PS2 is darn complicated.

The PS2 is much more complicated than the PS1, Wii, and I assume the Xbox. It's arguably more complicated than the PS3. Its hardware does a lot of tricky things, so where the PSP is definitely on the easier to emulate side, the PS2 is on the harder to emulate side. You've picked the system that makes PPSSPP look the best in comparison.


As far as recommended specs - it can vary heavily by what game you're trying to run.

I think a GeForce 750 Ti and 3.2 Ghz i5 would be enough to have a good experience in pretty much any game at nice settings. That being said, for 5x texture scaling, a 4.0+ Ghz i5/i7 is definitely more ideal. As for RAM, PPSSPP itself doesn't need much so even 4GB or less would still be recommended.

For a phone, there's really no device that will give you an awesome experience with high quality settings, but with modest settings things should work fine on the latest powerful devices out now - 2.0+ Ghz CPU, Tegra K1 or X1 / Adreno 4xx / Mali-T6xx / PowerVR-6xxx.

-[Unknown]