fonzi Actually in most cases PS3 emulation is easier than PS2 emulation. Even the PS3 itself struggled to genuinely emulate PS2 hardware, and the early backwards-compatible models just had the real PS2 hardware in them to help with it.
PS2 emulation is typically limited by your GPU, and PS3 emulation is typically limited by your CPU. ie. a high core-count, high frequency CPU would do far better with PS3 emulation than it would PS2 emulation, which the 4th gen i5 is only moderately good at. Hence, you wouldn’t see much a difference between the systems because of that.
Of course, in addition to that there’s all the millions of other factors that play into it like the type of game emulated, its hardware strengths/weaknesses, its dependencies on hardware components, etc. I can only give a generalised answer, there will always be examples that go against it. If you’ve found a hardware configuration that works great for PS2, that’s great! But the advice for if you’re buying new hardware for the specific purpose of emulating PS2 specifically (assuming they want to prioritise full speed over budget, but that’s ultimately up to them), I would still recommend getting a dedicated GPU.
I’m actually a huge fan of reusing old computers as emulation machines, repurposing old hardware instead of throwing it out is fantastic. But I wouldn’t want to disappoint someone looking for new hardware.
