Emulation Performance Test: Apple Silicon MacBooks

As we begin this testing process, I'm excited to see how well these emulators will perform on our Apple Silicon MacBook. We have several emulators lined up for testing, including Citra (3DS), OpenEMU (N64), PPSSPP, and Dolphin (GameCube and Wii). Each of these emulators offers a unique experience, and I'll be putting them through their paces to see how well they perform.

First up, we have Midnight Club: Dub Edition. This game is relatively easy to emulate, so let's see how OpenEMU handles it. Ah, looks like OpenEMU is performing great on our N64 emulator. We're seeing smooth gameplay and minimal dips in performance. Next, we have Chains of Olympus, which is another 3DS title that should run well with Citra.

Moving on, we have the standalone version of Citra, the 3DS emulator. I'm excited to see how this performs, especially since it's a relatively new release. Unfortunately, my experience with Citra was a bit more mixed. As soon as I tried to open up another game after shutting down Deterra: Live Dimensions, Citra kept crashing on me. No matter how many times I rebooted the MacBook, I couldn't seem to get it working again. It's clear that this emulator still needs some work.

On the other hand, the standalone version of Dolphin for GameCube and Wii is performing incredibly well. We're seeing smooth gameplay at 1080p resolution using the Vulkan backend, with minimal dips in performance. This is a great sign, as this emulator is often considered one of the more challenging ones to run. I've seen it dip down every once in a while, but not low enough to be noticeable during gameplay.

To take things up a notch, I decided to try running some harder-to-emulate games on Dolphin. First up, we have F-Zero GX, which is known for its intense action and special effects. As expected, the performance is still smooth at 1080p resolution using the Vulkan backend. When I decided to bump it up to 4K resolution, the performance remained rock-solid, with no noticeable dips in frame rate.

Another harder-to-run game that I tested on Dolphin was Automotive, which runs at 1080p resolution using the Vulcan backend. As expected, the performance was still excellent, and when I bumped it up to 4K resolution, everything ran smoothly without any issues. It's clear that this emulator is capable of handling demanding games with ease.

As a side note, we're actually running two emulators on our MacBook simultaneously - Citra and Dolphin. This allows us to compare the performance of each emulator in different situations. In this case, Dolphin is performing consistently better than Citra, but it's worth noting that Citra still needs some work to reach its full potential.

Finally, I want to mention that using Rosetta 2 to emulate x86 on our Apple Silicon MacBook allows us to run GameCube games like Deterra: Live Dimensions. This feature is still relatively new and may not be widely supported by developers just yet, but it's exciting to see how well it works in practice.

In conclusion, my testing experience with these emulators has been surprisingly positive. While Citra still needs some work, Dolphin is performing incredibly well on our Apple Silicon MacBook. As we move forward, I'm excited to see how these emulators continue to evolve and improve. With the release of Rosetta 2, it's clear that Apple is committed to providing a seamless gaming experience on their new hardware.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be testing out some of our favorite emulators on the all new apple macbook pro with the all-new apple silicon now i've actually been super excited about this not that it's a new macbook coming out but that it's powered by an arm chip and by the way before we even get started this is not my personal macbook i was actually lucky enough to borrow this from one of my buddies who just bought it before he even opened it up he'd let me use it for this test here now if you're a regular viewer of my channel you know that i'm very partial to arm based single board computers and this isn't much different this is not running an intel cpu this is not running an amd cpu this is apple silicon it's known as the m1 chip and it's an arm cpu now keep in mind when we get into running these retro emulators they were never designed to run on an arm chip they were actually designed to run on x86 because that's all these macs have been powered by for a very long time but what apple has done is introduced something called rosetta 2. it's a dynamic binary translator and it creates an application compatibility layer between x86 and the m1 chip or these arm chips that are in these new macbooks so really when it comes down to it we're actually running an emulator inside of an emulator and it's kind of weird to think about but i've been really wanting to get my hands on one of these m1 chips so i could test out some emulation on it i also want to get into some gaming but this video is strictly dedicated to emulation we're gonna test out some dreamcast psp n64 gamecube and wii but before we jump right into it i do want to give you a quick rundown on the specs so we have the 2020 macbook pro this is the base model it's got the apple m1 cpu eight cores up to 3.2 gigahertz we also have eight gpu cores and eight gigs of ram so now it's time to see how this thing really performs with emulation i'm gonna plug this into my game capture i'll be using one of the thunderbolt ports on the side here to do hdmi out to that and as for the controller i'll be using it's this sn30 pro it's a bluetooth controller and it does connect right up to this macbook here it works with everything that i've tested but it's actually detected as a ps4 controller all right so we're starting off with dreamcast using the standalone redream emulator i'm upscaled to 3840x2880 that's as high as we can go with it and you'll notice i'm not in full screen mode and that's because i can't get this cpu and gpu overlay to work in full screen mode it just goes behind everything but i have tested it and it works just as well i mean there's really no reason it wouldn't work great in full screen mode but as you can see dreamcast on this m1 macbook is really great and we're upscaled as high as we can go with the redream emulator so i got one more for dreamcast to test after this game then we'll move over to psp this way right taxi get ready okay so with psp i can't get the standalone version to work nor can i get the version inside of retro arch to work so what i'm using here is open emu if you're familiar with emulation on mac you'll know exactly what i'm talking about open emu works absolutely amazing there's a ton of different emulators that are available here but the options are very limited so i wasn't able to upscale at all with psp as soon as the developers of pp sspp get a working version for these m1 max i will run another test but seeing how it's running at 1x here i'm pretty sure we'll be able to do 3 and 4 with all the games you're going to see running in this video it actually works really well and it runs these harder to emulate games just fine here we have midnight club dub edition next up you'll see chains of olympus i must return next up we have n64 still here with open emu and as you can see i mean it's performing great this is diddy kong racing i also tested 007 goldeneye and going into this i figured that n64 would work well so the standalone version of citra the 3ds emulator was working fine as you can see here i'm running deterra live dimensions we're at 1x resolution using the opengl back in and we're getting pretty good performance here but as soon as i shut this game down and tried to open up another one i couldn't get anything to work citra kept crashing on me i rebooted the macbook several times trying to get it to work but unfortunately it just won't work again now i'm sure i could go through uninstall this completely reinstall it and start another game but it might happen again so i kind of wanted to put this off to the side for now but i do see this emulator running quite well on apple silicon in the future the final emulator that i tested was the standalone version of dolphin for gamecube and wii where at 1080p and performance was very very surprising here you'll see these first couple games running great at 1080p and this was the resolution i initially started with i didn't even try the native resolution i just went straight up just to see what it would do and if it was going to malfunction i was going to back it back off so i moved over to one of the harder games to run which is f-zero gx we're still at 1080p using the vulkan back-end performance is amazing here really surprised to see this running at 1080p i mean this is kind of one of my go-to tests there's a lot of effects on screen and as you can see we get minimal dips i've seen it dip down every once in a while but not low at all i mean it really wasn't noticeable during gameplay another harder to run game that i usually test is automotive 1080p vulcan back in and by this time everything was running great at 1080p so i figured we'd try to go up to 4k with it so from the game i just paused it went right into the dolphin settings saved my game upped it to 4k from 1080p went right back into the game and went full screen with it and as you can see it's still running it perfectly fine 60 fps 4k on this apple m1 chip is pretty awesome in my opinion now like i mentioned at the beginning this is actually using rosetta 2 to emulate x86 so we can emulate a gamecube game so basically we have two emulators running here at the same time and we're able to achieve this performance to tell you the truth i was pretty blown away by how well it ran this emulator and since i was still here with the dolphin emulator i figured i'd throw a couple wii games at it i didn't even bother going back down to 1080p seeing the performance in automotive at 4k so both of these wii games you're gonna see are running at 4k with the vulcan back in wonderful systems so all in all emulation performance here is actually really great now it's still really early so there are some emulators that aren't working i definitely ran into some issues with citra i couldn't get the standalone version of ppsspp working and when i tried to launch psp games inside of retroarch it just crashed out on me so it definitely needs some work the developers need to get these in their hands so they can get this stuff working better but going into this i really wasn't expecting this kind of performance and seeing that this is the first generation of apple silicon this is probably going to be really awesome in the future for emulation but i'm personally not going to be swapping out my x86 windows linux machine for something like this at least not at this time but who knows maybe a couple years down the road this apple silicon is really going to take off and be ultra powerful but as it sits right now this was the first release and i do have to say it i'm actually impressed i went into this not really wanting to like this chip but coming out of it it's not bad at all but that's gonna wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching i will have this in my possession for about the next three days so if there's anything else you want to see running on this macbook just let me know what it is in the comments below and maybe i can get a video made but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be testing out some of our favorite emulators on the all new apple macbook pro with the all-new apple silicon now i've actually been super excited about this not that it's a new macbook coming out but that it's powered by an arm chip and by the way before we even get started this is not my personal macbook i was actually lucky enough to borrow this from one of my buddies who just bought it before he even opened it up he'd let me use it for this test here now if you're a regular viewer of my channel you know that i'm very partial to arm based single board computers and this isn't much different this is not running an intel cpu this is not running an amd cpu this is apple silicon it's known as the m1 chip and it's an arm cpu now keep in mind when we get into running these retro emulators they were never designed to run on an arm chip they were actually designed to run on x86 because that's all these macs have been powered by for a very long time but what apple has done is introduced something called rosetta 2. it's a dynamic binary translator and it creates an application compatibility layer between x86 and the m1 chip or these arm chips that are in these new macbooks so really when it comes down to it we're actually running an emulator inside of an emulator and it's kind of weird to think about but i've been really wanting to get my hands on one of these m1 chips so i could test out some emulation on it i also want to get into some gaming but this video is strictly dedicated to emulation we're gonna test out some dreamcast psp n64 gamecube and wii but before we jump right into it i do want to give you a quick rundown on the specs so we have the 2020 macbook pro this is the base model it's got the apple m1 cpu eight cores up to 3.2 gigahertz we also have eight gpu cores and eight gigs of ram so now it's time to see how this thing really performs with emulation i'm gonna plug this into my game capture i'll be using one of the thunderbolt ports on the side here to do hdmi out to that and as for the controller i'll be using it's this sn30 pro it's a bluetooth controller and it does connect right up to this macbook here it works with everything that i've tested but it's actually detected as a ps4 controller all right so we're starting off with dreamcast using the standalone redream emulator i'm upscaled to 3840x2880 that's as high as we can go with it and you'll notice i'm not in full screen mode and that's because i can't get this cpu and gpu overlay to work in full screen mode it just goes behind everything but i have tested it and it works just as well i mean there's really no reason it wouldn't work great in full screen mode but as you can see dreamcast on this m1 macbook is really great and we're upscaled as high as we can go with the redream emulator so i got one more for dreamcast to test after this game then we'll move over to psp this way right taxi get ready okay so with psp i can't get the standalone version to work nor can i get the version inside of retro arch to work so what i'm using here is open emu if you're familiar with emulation on mac you'll know exactly what i'm talking about open emu works absolutely amazing there's a ton of different emulators that are available here but the options are very limited so i wasn't able to upscale at all with psp as soon as the developers of pp sspp get a working version for these m1 max i will run another test but seeing how it's running at 1x here i'm pretty sure we'll be able to do 3 and 4 with all the games you're going to see running in this video it actually works really well and it runs these harder to emulate games just fine here we have midnight club dub edition next up you'll see chains of olympus i must return next up we have n64 still here with open emu and as you can see i mean it's performing great this is diddy kong racing i also tested 007 goldeneye and going into this i figured that n64 would work well so the standalone version of citra the 3ds emulator was working fine as you can see here i'm running deterra live dimensions we're at 1x resolution using the opengl back in and we're getting pretty good performance here but as soon as i shut this game down and tried to open up another one i couldn't get anything to work citra kept crashing on me i rebooted the macbook several times trying to get it to work but unfortunately it just won't work again now i'm sure i could go through uninstall this completely reinstall it and start another game but it might happen again so i kind of wanted to put this off to the side for now but i do see this emulator running quite well on apple silicon in the future the final emulator that i tested was the standalone version of dolphin for gamecube and wii where at 1080p and performance was very very surprising here you'll see these first couple games running great at 1080p and this was the resolution i initially started with i didn't even try the native resolution i just went straight up just to see what it would do and if it was going to malfunction i was going to back it back off so i moved over to one of the harder games to run which is f-zero gx we're still at 1080p using the vulkan back-end performance is amazing here really surprised to see this running at 1080p i mean this is kind of one of my go-to tests there's a lot of effects on screen and as you can see we get minimal dips i've seen it dip down every once in a while but not low at all i mean it really wasn't noticeable during gameplay another harder to run game that i usually test is automotive 1080p vulcan back in and by this time everything was running great at 1080p so i figured we'd try to go up to 4k with it so from the game i just paused it went right into the dolphin settings saved my game upped it to 4k from 1080p went right back into the game and went full screen with it and as you can see it's still running it perfectly fine 60 fps 4k on this apple m1 chip is pretty awesome in my opinion now like i mentioned at the beginning this is actually using rosetta 2 to emulate x86 so we can emulate a gamecube game so basically we have two emulators running here at the same time and we're able to achieve this performance to tell you the truth i was pretty blown away by how well it ran this emulator and since i was still here with the dolphin emulator i figured i'd throw a couple wii games at it i didn't even bother going back down to 1080p seeing the performance in automotive at 4k so both of these wii games you're gonna see are running at 4k with the vulcan back in wonderful systems so all in all emulation performance here is actually really great now it's still really early so there are some emulators that aren't working i definitely ran into some issues with citra i couldn't get the standalone version of ppsspp working and when i tried to launch psp games inside of retroarch it just crashed out on me so it definitely needs some work the developers need to get these in their hands so they can get this stuff working better but going into this i really wasn't expecting this kind of performance and seeing that this is the first generation of apple silicon this is probably going to be really awesome in the future for emulation but i'm personally not going to be swapping out my x86 windows linux machine for something like this at least not at this time but who knows maybe a couple years down the road this apple silicon is really going to take off and be ultra powerful but as it sits right now this was the first release and i do have to say it i'm actually impressed i went into this not really wanting to like this chip but coming out of it it's not bad at all but that's gonna wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching i will have this in my possession for about the next three days so if there's anything else you want to see running on this macbook just let me know what it is in the comments below and maybe i can get a video made but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching you\n"