Emulating Xbox, PS2 On Lenovo M75q ThinkCentre Mini PC With Ryzen3 3200GE Pro, Better Than M1 or M4?
Lactobacillus Prime
#Ryzen #MiniPC #Emulation
In this video I compare the emulation of Xbox, PlayStation 2 on the Ryzen3200GE Pro powered Thinkcentre M75q with Vega GPU and you can compare that to the emulators running on the M1 and M4 Macs I used to run the same PCSX2 and Xemu emulators in my other videos. It’s hard to say which platform is the better emulation platform.
The Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q and the Apple M1 Mac Mini both offer solid emulation performance, but they cater to slightly different needs and preferences. The ThinkCentre M75q, powered by AMD Ryzen processors (3200GE Pro), is a compact desktop that’s great for light work and some emulation tasks. It’s particularly good for emulating systems like PlayStation 2, Wii, Gamecube and Game Boy Advance, though it might struggle with more demanding titles.
On the other hand, the M1 Mac Mini, with its Apple Silicon chip, is a quite the powerhouse for emulation. It runs on ARM architecture which makes it less efficient when you’re running Intel apps through Rosetta 2. It can handle a wider range of systems: retro consoles to more recent ones like PlayStation 2, 3, Xbox, Wii, WiiU and even Switch some with more ease than others. Both have their specific set of emulators that perform really well.
The M1’s unified memory architecture and powerful GPU make it a strong contender for demanding emulation tasks, though it might still face challenges with certain emulators and how they make use of the M1’s hard- and software. The Apple Silicon Macs are capable of natively running MacOS and Linux, Windows only through virtualization. Intel software on MacOS is ‘translated on the fly’ through Rosetta 2. Apple did do a similar thing with the transition from PowerPC to Intel in the Tiger OSX 10.4.x era. Intel software on Linux and Windows 11 can be executed through Rosetta 2 on Linux by exposing a virtualized virtual Intel CPU and Windows 11 on Parallels through their virtualization technique. There’s compromises and benefits to it all.
A M1 or M4 or Apple Silicon Mac is nice if you like to use the MacOS environment, otherwise I really wouldn’t bother with Mac at this point in time when it comes to emulation of consoles. If you are already editing your videos in Davinci Resolve on Windows / Linux you could consider moving that over to the Apple Silicon Mac as they do render 1080p videos tremendously fast. The differences become less apparent with higher-def videos when using higher end x86 CPUs. When it comes to emulation, especially PlayStation 2 and how PCSX2 performs the Ryzen 3200GE can at many points be a bit better and has less variability in the frame times which makes it feel more solid. The Ryzen 3200GE can also also do some decent PlayStation 3 even Switch and is great at DOSBox-X and VMWare, VirtualBox Windows98 with 3D3, DirectX hardware accelleration through SoftGPU.
There’s no definite pros and cons to choosing either machine looking at them side by side. The user is the biggest deciding factor (well the user decides as the machine can’t LOL).
Hardware of the M75q ThinkCentre Mini PC
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 3200GE w/ Radeon Vega Graphics (4) @ 3.300GHz
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series
Memory: 5674MiB / 15663MiB
Hardware & software used:
OS: Linux Mint x86_64 with 6.x Kernel
Host: 11A5S19C00 ThinkCentre M75q
Resolution: 1920×1080
Capturing with OBS capturing the 1080p60 screen at 720p60 (faster won’t be possible as the Ryzen3200GE Pro doesn’t offer hardware encoding so it is software based)
Editing this time on M1 iPad Air with iMovie
Chapters
00:00:00 – Setup & Mini Room Tour
00:01:42 – Booting ThinkCentre M75q Neofetch Ryzen 3200GE PRO, Vega 8
00:01:51 – Gauntlet Seven Sorrows (Xbox Xemu 0.8.5)
00:12:35 – Maximo Ghosts to Glorty (PS2 PCSX2 v2.2.0)
00:15:32 – 16 in 1 Shmups Multi Disc (Raiden III, Homura, Mushihimesama, Gigawing, Ibara, XII Stag (PS2)
00:44:15 – Gauntled Seven Sorrows (PS2)
00:53:02 – Gran Turismo A-Spec (PS2)
00:59:14 – Outrun 2 SP running too slow (PS2)
01:01:31 – Project Gotham Racing running too slow (XBox Xemu 0.8.5)
01:03:11 – Heretic & Hexen (MS-DOS DOSBox-X with FluidSynth Midi)
01:11:27 – Ridge Racer Type 4 (PlayStation DuckStation)
01:22:50 – Sega Rally 2006 (PS2)
01:32:21 – Closing Remarks ‘It Depends, not clear cut’ read info in video description
Enjoy & thanks for watching
– LactobacillusPrime
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