Does PPSSPP use gpu to boost speed?

[piau9000]

I've a really old onboard pc (sempron LE-1150) and PPSSPP works fine most of the time as it don't have a very high requirement.
But today almost all software released are using the opengl 3 (my onboard chipset only support 2.1) so I've decided to buy a vidcard with new technologies. I got a gt 520 that is a low end card (I really don't care about high end stuff).
My question is: Does the emulator use the vidcard to boost the speed? I'm asking this because most emulators today only use the CPU and don't use the GPU at all.

[TheDax]

If it didn't, we wouldn't have ports to mobile devices.

If you want to see the difference it makes, turn on software rendering (CPU does the graphics rendering) and run a game with that mode, versus the default settings.

[piau9000]

But is not there a difference between the "CPU using the opengl to do the processing" and the "GPU using using the opengl to do the processing"?

I mean, I have a onboard PC so my CPU do the proccess anyway but, can the emulator use the more advanced GPU, and then, have a better performance because of it?

[TheDax]

When you use software rendering, PPSSPP doesn't use any GPU at all, not even an oboard one, and not even an on-die CPU one, so the speed drop will be dramatic (50% speed loss or more, depending on the game, how fast your CPU is, etc.). It uses the CPU entirely. But yes, dedicated GPUs will give better performance than integrated ones. Don't buy a GTX Titan just for emulation though; the CPU matters most.

[piau9000]

Thanks.
Yeah, I'm not into high end PCs. But I care about the technologies.
For example, I'm buying the GT 520 for the OpenGL 4, DirectX 11, Shader 5.0 and OpenCL 1 support.
And if one day I do a upgrade in the MOBO/CPU I'll already have a good GPU.

I had a really bad experience with a old PC that didn't even had directx 9 so I don't want to have a "REALLY" obsolete PC anymore...

[TheDax]

Nvidia is pretty much king of OpenGL (meaning it's PPSSPP/Dolphin friendly), followed by newer ATI cards (the newer ones have pretty good support, the old ones, not so much), and in dead last is Intel (awful OpenGL support, and slow as molasses). Paired with a decent CPU (newer i3/i5) you should be running pretty much any game in PPSSPP at full speed as long as you're not using software rendering, lol.

[piau9000]

Hi, sorry for necroing.
I've been using the gt 520 and the boost is very high.
In Macross Triangle Frontier, if I put the internal resolution to 2x it can run at 100% all the time, even with frameskip disabled.
If I use the TAB key, the max speed is around 200%/300%.

Before I could not have this performance. With 2x internal and frameskip disabled it ran at about 50%.

As I said my CPU is very old but even then the boost was quite high.
So I think that, compared to other emulators, PPSSPP uses the GPU a lot.

I've not tested with performance hogs like God of War or GTA. But it's certain that it will be better than before (15% XD).