Is a GPU "necessary" atm?

CH3rn0b0q

Good evening
I am a relatively new Batocera user. I use the OS directly installed on a M.2 SSD. The processor is an Intel 9100, 3.60Ghz (Single Thread Rating: 2554) with Intel UHD Graphics 630 iGPU.
I am very pleasantly surprised that almost everything works cleanly and you have to tinker around very little. Especially the performance of the Ps2/N64 games surprised me very much!

My question: Does a separate graphics card have a strong positive effect on the performance or the look of the graphics-intensive games or can one spare the graphics card for the moment? Any opinions or field reports :)?

Kind regards

joinski

CH3rn0b0q

A separate graphics card can improve the performance, when you want to play everything higher than 16 bit console games (PSX, N64, Dreamcast, PSP, 3DS, Gamecube/Wii, PS2) at a higher native/internal resolution (upscaled).

Here you can see a list of different hardware, and which multiple native resolution did run at full speed with them:
https://wiki.batocera.org/doku.php?id=pc_performance

Emulation depends mostly on Single Thread CPU Performance. The higher the Single Thread Performance of the CPU, the better.
But for some graphically more demanding games (and especially if you want to upscale the internal resolution), the GPU-performance is also important.

CH3rn0b0q

Thanks for the answer. I will consider getting myself a GT 1030 in the near future if I find something on special offer :) But so far I am also satisfied with the iGPU. Perhaps I'll just wait till the Vulkan support happens.

jayjr1105

That iGPU will be better than what you think. I have an i5 4690 with 4600 graphics and I can play quite a few PS2 games. Kudos to the Batocera team for good intel graphics support.

CH3rn0b0q

Kudos to the Batocera team for good intel graphics support

👆This
The Batocera-Team do quite a lot of things right.

batofan

Got AMD 3200G with Vega integrated graphics - it is a very capable GPU (for what it is), can handle anything you throw at it, including Wii/Gamecube at 1080p internal resolution (for most of the games, at least).

But right now it leaves me craving a bit more performance, I would like to run all these games at 4K resolution - which is not possible with that APU. Adding even old and relatively low end card like GTX 960 would make massive improvement to GPU prowess and essentially allow you to remove GPU aspect as a bottleneck completely (it would be able to run pretty much everything at 4K maxed out, ubershaders and stuff)