PC Emulation People: Help a Total Newbie Out

[dogbox]

I have been thinking a lot about wanting to emulate PS2 games. Just to be clear and so this thread is not immediately derailed: I am planning on dumping all of my own games. I am not advocating for piracy in any way, nor do I want any info about anything like that!

My question comes down to hardware, really. I don't know a dang thing about PCs, generally speaking. What would be sufficient hardware to comfortably run PS2 games at 1080p or maybe 1440p? I'm sure it depends somewhat on what games are being emulated and so on, but any ballpark recommendations would be great. I use a Macbook for regular computing, so this PC would be purpose built essentially as a retro console.

Any hardware, OS, case or other such advice would be much appreciated. Just trying get an idea of how daunting and costly an endeavour it'd be for me. Thanks!

 

[Polyh3dron]

Ryzen 5600X with a RTX 3060 should do the trick

 

[Starlatine]

You need to keep in mind that (afaik) PS2 emulation is still not 100% perfect and many games are not fully compatible. So no matter your rig, games could still be wonky and perform bad. There's usually compatibility lists for whatever emulator you plan on using, so check them too

 

[Bradford]

PS2 games are generally easy to emulate and aren't going to be super hardware intensive; You could easily function with a decent Ryzen and an old graphics card (honestly a 1070 is perfectly acceptable for this).

Most compatibility issues with PS2 emulation are on a functionality level and aren't super bottlenecked by hardware -- many of the games that don't work simply don't work correctly no matter how strong a PC you have, so you don't need to worry too much about hardware.

Just get a decent CPU and a relatively recent graphics card and you should be fine.

 

[jotun?]

In general, a fast CPU is the most important part

 

[Deleted member 37011]

My brother did fine with a Ryzen 5 APU and no graphics card. 1080p no problem.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

Gran Turismo 4 ran great on my GTX 970 a few years ago. So, it really depends on the game (but 1440p is overkill imo, that is double the pixels of 1080p and emulated games don't always scale resolution in an advantageous/optimized way).

My most recent emulation adventure was Breath of the Wild running at 24:10 3840x1600 resolution on a RTX 3080. It ran TERRIBLE... until I set up all the tweaks that people came up with just for this certain game. Those tweaks tripled my framerate and only work with this game, there is no visible difference to my eyes, just that it stays between 40-70fps now instead of 18-24fps.

3D emulation is a very title-by-title thing when it comes to how much power you need and if a game has gotten community optimizations.
SNES emulation by comparison is just "launch game" and it runs fine.

 

[Pellaidh]

Really depends on the game, but PS2 games generally aren't that demanding. My system with an old i5-6600k and an Nvidia 1060 does just fine for the most part. Sadly, at least back when I tried it, the PS2 emulator took quite a bit of tweaking to work perfectly.

PCSX2 has a compatibility wiki here, where people report their performance and PC specs if you have specific games in mind.

The emulator team also has a Youtube channel with some examples, with the PC specs they used in the video descriptions. And you can see that certain games run just fine even on 10 year old hardware.

 

[Dreamboum]

I have a 970 and an i5 6500 and everything works fine. As long as you're not attempting to play PS3 games everything below that will work well. Keep in mind that you're turning 15 years old games to 4K, any recent GPU can do the job. It's generally the CPU that has to be somewhat good.

 

[ss_lemonade]

Other than emulator compatibility issues, my 3570k and GTX 780 managed just fine many many years ago (at higher resolutions too), so I imagine anything new would have no issues at all.

 

[Plywood]

Anything within the last 8 years should run it comfortably honestly.

 

[Aeana]

Most PS2 games will hit the CPU harder than the GPU. But we are at the point where even integrated graphics on a somewhat recent CPU is plenty for most PS2 games. Just about any general use PC hardware you can buy right now should suffice.