News Asus Ally Emulates PS3, Nintendo Switch, Xbox 360 with Ease

[Admin]

ETA Prime demonstrates the emulation potential of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld complete with performance stats.

Asus Ally Emulates PS3, Nintendo Switch, Xbox 360 with Ease : Read more

 

[Metal Messiah.]

The new Asus ROG Ally is able to easily emulate games because the AMD Ryzen Z1 APUs come with AVX-512 support.

As you can see one huge advantage that the handheld offers is support for AVX-512 instructions which offer great performance across various emulators including RPCS3.

AMD actually made a good and reasonable decision by putting AVX-512 support on its Ryzen Z1 APUs.

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

The best thing about the ROG Ally is that Asus is basically agnostic when it comes to gaming.

The Asus launcher supports Steam, GoG, Epic Game Store, Nvidia cloud, Microsoft Game Pass, etc.

If you want to run emulators, or whatever, Asus makes it easy to do.

On the Steam Deck if felt like I was behind pushed to use Steam. The whole SteamOS ecosystem is tailored to Steam. You can install Windows on Steam Deck, but as LinusTechTips has shown, it is a mess. And why wouldn't it be, Steam Deck was designed for you to buy Steam games, they don't really want you to install Windows.

 

[mwm2010]

The best thing about the ROG Ally is that Asus is basically agnostic when it comes to gaming.

The Asus launcher supports Steam, GoG, Epic Game Store, Nvidia cloud, Microsoft Game Pass, etc.

If you want to run emulators, or whatever, Asus makes it easy to do.

On the Steam Deck if felt like I was behind pushed to use Steam. The whole SteamOS ecosystem is tailored to Steam. You can install Windows on Steam Deck, but as LinusTechTips has shown, it is a mess. And why wouldn't it be, Steam Deck was designed for you to buy Steam games, they don't really want you to install Windows.

Yeah, this is why(if I ever need a gaming handheld) I would prefer the ROG Ally over the Steam Deck.

 

[AAA978]

The new Asus ROG Ally is able to easily emulate games because the AMD Ryzen Z1 APUs come with AVX-512 support.

RPCS3 Blog on Github:

Why Is AVX 512 Useful for RPCS3?

It’s often said that the importance of the difference between instruction sets on modern computers is overblown, and it’s hard to actually disagree with this observation. Since 90% of the average program is made up of basic ALU instructions, loads and stores, and branch instructions, and given the fact that the gap between different instruction sets is very small in terms of these basic instructions, it’s easy to agree with this conclusion.

But the PS3 emulator RPCS3 isn’t an average program. Even if you haven’t used the emulator itself, you may have heard RPCS3 brought up as an example of consumer software that can take advantage of AVX-512. In this blog post I’ll cover why exactly the new instructions and features introduced in the AVX-512 family are so useful for PS3 emulation. In some situations use of 512 bit instructions can be profitable for RPCS3, but in this post I’ll be covering why the new instructions introduced are useful at 128 and 256 bit lengths.

...
A lot of technical details about PS3 CELL and AVX-512
...

The recently announced Zen 4 was announced to support AVX-512 instructions as well. Since it’s likely that the successor to devices such as the steam deck will use a Zen 4 based CPU, it’s possible the number of people wanting to play games on a low end device that supports AVX-512 will increase significantly. Even when the target framerate is already achievable without AVX-512, enabling AVX-512 optimizations could improve battery life, or provide more TDP to the gpu which could enable gameplay at higher resolutions.

emulator that would likely benefit greatly from AVX-512 optimizations is PCSX2. Since the PS2’s VUs inspired much of the behavior and design for the SPUs, many of the optimizations which apply to RPCS3 should also apply to PCSX2. In particular, vrangeps should be helpful for improving their clamping code.

 

[ezst036]

The best thing about the ROG Ally is that Asus is basically agnostic when it comes to gaming.

The Asus launcher supports Steam, GoG, Epic Game Store, Nvidia cloud, Microsoft Game Pass, etc.

If you want to run emulators, or whatever, Asus makes it easy to do.

On the Steam Deck if felt like I was behind pushed to use Steam. The whole SteamOS ecosystem is tailored to Steam. You can install Windows on Steam Deck, but as LinusTechTips has shown, it is a mess. And why wouldn't it be, Steam Deck was designed for you to buy Steam games, they don't really want you to install Windows.

Right, this all makes sense. However you skipped over one of the biggest reasons.

There is a whole market out there looking specifically to get away from Windows, and that market is growing. Now I suppose you could buy an Ally or one of the many others out there and do a Linux install, which I'm sure would be just fine. But one of the reasons the Steam Deck is cheaper is because it doesn't have a built-in Windows tax. And every day gaming on the Deck gets better and better - even outside of the games. Since the whole SteamOS ecosystem is tailored to Steam - that means, the whole SteamOS ecosystem is tailored toward gaming, it's better than trying to use some corporate operating system that's trying hard to double up also as a gamer's operating system.

Windows just moves too slow these days. Old man can't keep up - time to get out of the way.

 

[Devoteicon]

People got some pretty big pockets.

 

[Amdlova]

I use the galaxy s23 to play some emulators. Can run full hd and do more things... uses a dex pad with a lg projector pf50ks

 

[-Fran-]

The best thing about the ROG Ally is that Asus is basically agnostic when it comes to gaming.

The Asus launcher supports Steam, GoG, Epic Game Store, Nvidia cloud, Microsoft Game Pass, etc.

If you want to run emulators, or whatever, Asus makes it easy to do.

On the Steam Deck if felt like I was behind pushed to use Steam. The whole SteamOS ecosystem is tailored to Steam. You can install Windows on Steam Deck, but as LinusTechTips has shown, it is a mess. And why wouldn't it be, Steam Deck was designed for you to buy Steam games, they don't really want you to install Windows.

Uh... You can install Windows in a Steam Deck just fine...

You lose a lot of the secret sauce from Valve when it comes to optimizations around the OS and it shows, but at least you can run anything you would in a normal Windows PC.

Regards.

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

Uh... You can install Windows in a Steam Deck just fine..

I didn't say you couldn't. I said installing Windows is a complete mess on Steam Deck, which is true.

Valve has not fixed any of the issues, and why would they, the truth is that Valve doesn't want you to use Windows and other game stores on Steam Deck. Steam Deck "supports" installing Windows kind of like Macbooks "support" installing Windows. In truth, they don't really want you to do that.

The moment I wanted to install my GoG games for example, I needed a 3rd party launcher, on top of the GoG launcher, which was a disaster. And like I said, installing Windows on Steam Deck is not a solution due to all the issues, like LTT points out.

I know my GoG library works flawlessly on Windows, and Asus fully supports it and even made it part of their launcher.

 

[RedBear87]

AMD actually made a good and reasonable decision by putting AVX-512 support on its Ryzen Z1 APUs.

And Intel kept committing willing suicide by disabling AVX-512 on Alder Lake and Raptor Lake thinking that... it would improve their HEDT sales or something?

 

[-Fran-]

I didn't say you couldn't. I said installing Windows is a complete mess on Steam Deck, which is true.

Valve has not fixed any of the issues, and why would they, the truth is that Valve doesn't want you to use Windows and other game stores on Steam Deck. Steam Deck "supports" installing Windows kind of like Macbooks "support" installing Windows. In truth, they don't really want you to do that.

The moment I wanted to install my GoG games for example, I needed a 3rd party launcher, on top of the GoG launcher, which was a disaster. And like I said, installing Windows on Steam Deck is not a solution due to all the issues, like LTT points out.

I know my GoG library works flawlessly on Windows, and Asus fully supports it and even made it part of their launcher.

That video is so old that it doesn't contain the audio drivers that Valve has already released a long while back now.

Plus, you cannot install Windows in Apple machines. At least not after they moved away from Intel. You can install Windows so it runs "normally" on the Deck, so not quite the same.

And I don't understand what is the problem with other installers in the Deck... I have every other launcher that supports Linux natively running in my Deck and I'm sure it would not be a problem in Windows. Keep in mind Linus made a comment, somewhere, that you couldn't even install Discord in it, but guess what, I have Discord install in my Deck and I use it to talk to my buddies when I'm playing with the Deck and it works just fine.

I'll stop here, as it seems you have made your mind already and I do like the Ally, but I still think the Deck is the better all-around device. The track pads are just too good to not have IMO.

Regards.

 

[TerryLaze]

Windows just moves too slow these days. Old man can't keep up - time to get out of the way.

Windows get's probably 90-80% of its money from businesses because they actually HAVE to pay the license instead of running it unlicensed forever.
It's not that they are slow to change it's that they are catering towards whoever pays the bills.
For the steam deck the gamers pay the bills so they are greatly motivated to making games run better.

And Intel kept committing willing suicide by disabling AVX-512 on Alder Lake and Raptor Lake thinking that... it would improve their HEDT sales or something?

They sell well enough without it and it's not like they threw away the technology, they can re-enable it whenever they feel pressure from competition or whenever they feel like it.

 

[RedBear87]

They sell well enough without it and it's not like they threw away the technology, they can re-enable it whenever they feel pressure from competition or whenever they feel like it.

The whole industry is in a downturn and AMD has been gaining market share for quite some time now, it's hard to see how they're selling well enough atm. Even if it has limited appeal a feature like AVX-512 might help them selling a few more parts, but evidently someone at Intel said "no, let's disable it and leave those sales to AMD, they need it more".

 

[TerryLaze]

The whole industry is in a downturn and AMD has been gaining market share for quite some time now, it's hard to see how they're selling well enough atm. Even if it has limited appeal a feature like AVX-512 might help them selling a few more parts, but evidently someone at Intel said "no, let's disable it and leave those sales to AMD, they need it more".

Look at the dates when there was a steep increase in AMD sales and when there was a steep decrease of sales for AMD.
Beginning of 2020 and mid 2022, coalligns with a very important event that drove hardware sales.
Mobile desktop and server are all between 15-20% right now and most of the rest of the sales go to intel, 80-85% looks well enough to me.

AMD and Intel CPU Market Share Report: Recovery on the Horizon (Updated)

Hope is on the horizon, mostly.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[MiniITXEconomy]

The new Asus ROG Ally is able to easily emulate games because the AMD Ryzen Z1 APUs come with AVX-512 support.

As you can see one huge advantage that the handheld offers is support for AVX-512 instructions which offer great performance across various emulators including RPCS3.

AMD actually made a good and reasonable decision by putting AVX-512 support on its Ryzen Z1 APUs.

Bro, how do you get over your initial anxiety about visiting those ratchet websites to download them ROMS, though? I could never get over that, and can't believe people do.

 

[TerryLaze]

Bro, how do you get over your initial anxiety about visiting those ratchet websites to download them ROMS, though? I could never get over that, and can't believe people do.

The internet archive is a very legit site that lets you borrow roms and play them on the browser.
They have an DMCA exemption because they are a library.

Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption To Help Archive Vintage Software

Downloading them is almost always illegal anyway but you can do that as well.
If you are extra paranoid you can look up rom hashes and compare the downloaded file against it to make sure nobody put anything extra in there.

 

[Metal Messiah.]

Bro, how do you get over your initial anxiety about visiting those ratchet websites to download them ROMS, though? I could never get over that, and can't believe people do.

Wait a minute friend. You got me all wrong. I didn't say I also emulate games on my PC after grabbing some ROMS. I was just talking about the advantage of AVX-512 used on modern CPUs, which some of the console emulators use, and also how it is beneficial for the emulator for those who want to get extra performance.

For example: According to a blog post published by Whatcookie, who is one of the many developers on the RPCS3 Emulator project, he compares how AVX-512 helps over standard AVX2 instructions. You can read the full blog here, but the main advantages of AVX-512 come in the form of:

• Larger register file
• New forms of old instructions
• Mask registers

The developer showed how all of this helps in improving the performance within RPCS3, the go-to-choice for PS3 Emulators. An Intel Core i9-12900K CPU was used for testing at 5.2 GHz with AVX-512 enabled. Using the standard SSE2 instructions, the game only delivered 5 FPS while moving to SSE 4.1 delivered a massive 160 FPS gain !

It is stated that the reason for this is due to the lack of SSSE3 instructions which are essential for the PlayStation 3 Emulator. Moving to AVX2/FMA, you get an additional 13% performance boost, and switching from AVX2 to AVX-512, you get a 30% performance boost to 242 FPS.

I'm not sure about other emulators though.