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Core i9-12900K AVX-512 Support Delivers Big Gains for PS3 Emulation

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One of the few gaming niches where AVX-512 makes a difference

According to @RPCS3 on Twitter, Intel's Alder Lake CPUs are some of the best CPUs you can buy for PS3 emulation right now. In a test showcasing God of War: Ascension, running on the Open-Sourced Playstation 3 Emulator, the Core i9-12900K is around 15% faster than the previous-gen Core i9-11900K. Both chips clocked in at 5.2 GHz.

To make the comparisons as even as possible, RPCS3 disabled all the E-cores on the 12900K and enabled the AVX-512 instructions set, which is an instruction set the Open-Sourced Playstation 3 Emulator can leverage. Both chips also had HyperThreading disabled and were overclocked to 5.2 GHz.

With these changes in mind, the 11900K was able to output 68 FPS in Gold of War: Ascension, meanwhile the 12900K increases that frame rate to 78FPS, a 10FPS difference or 14% difference in performance.

Unfortunately, @RPCS3 does not demonstrate emulation performance on the 12900K with the E cores enabled and AVX-512 disabled. This would be very interesting to know since it is the default Alder Lake configuration. It would also be interesting to see how much of a difference AVX-512 really makes to this PS3 emulator.

However, in another Twitter post, @RPCS3 notes that due to AVX-512 support, disabling the E cores does provide Alder Lake chips with increased performance in its PS3 emulation utility. Keeping the E cores enabled with AVX-512 disabled will leave "a lot of performance on the table."

So it appears the Open-Sourced Playstation 3 Emulator does take advantage of AVX-512 enough to make a big difference to gaming performance. For anyone who does a lot of PS3 emulation, it would be best to ensure AVX-512 support is on despite losing the extra multi-threaded performance of the efficiency cores.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • setx
    Unfortunately, @RPCS3 does not demonstrate emulation performance on the 12900K with the E cores enabled and AVX-512 disabled.
    You obviously would get worse performance, and probably much worse if system scheduler puts anything useful on E cores.

    Emulation was always extremely sensitive to performance of single thread and usually doesn't scale beyond several cores (as long as you are not doing something special like rendering graphics on CPU), so the E cores can only hurt the performance.
    Reply
  • spentshells
    I had that emulator running on some older hardware, Intel's first ddr4 platform. Some games were amazing, but the god of war games were all a slideshow far below unplayable. I think it's great they chose such a tough game to run using this emulator.
    I find it outstanding that the open source free software is able to implement that advanced instruction set in their freeware.
    Reply
  • Soaptrail
    With these changes in mind, the 11900K was able to output 68 FPS in Gold of War: Ascension, meanwhile the 12900K increases that frame rate to 78FPS, a 10FPS difference or 14% difference in performance.
    Reply
  • kinney
    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand this is one of my reasons for building an 11900K rig, I wanted AVX512 which was introduced on the consumer lineup with 11th gen when no one else could comprehend why. Most people never took the time to look very hard into it, or chose to dismiss it outright just because fanboy. For some tasks, it was proven to be an order of magnitude faster long ago, as in 40-times faster in some workloads. And AVX512 isn't not going away. We'll see if it's used in Windows 11's Android support. Intel invests heavily into software, and is writing that emulation. So place your bets. With 11th gen, the longtime parity error and L0 bugs introduced with Skylake were finally resolved, and you got AVX512.

    While there's still issues to be worked out on 12th gen, you get the best of every world on 11th gen. My 12900K is sitting here waiting for some DDR5. This 11900K is bug free, doesn't require disabling efficiency cores for games , and has AVX512. Not to mention a PC is more than a CPU. PCIE4.0 (something my Ryzen rigs enjoyed for years), or Z590's other I/O updates with adoption of Bluetooth 5.2/wifi6E, TB4/USB4.0, I say that 11th gen are the most derided and underrated CPU releases that I've seen in years.

    Happy to see more software utilizing AVX512, and I'm still recommending CPUs that have this instruction set. Or at least people should be aware and not so dismissive of it.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    kinney said:
    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand this is one of my reasons for building an 11900K rig, I wanted AVX512 which was introduced on the consumer lineup with 11th gen when no one else could comprehend why. Most people never took the time to look very hard into it, or chose to dismiss it outright just because fanboy. For some tasks, it was proven to be an order of magnitude faster long ago, as in 40-times faster in some workloads. And AVX512 isn't not going away. We'll see if it's used in Windows 11's Android support. Intel invests heavily into software, and is writing that emulation. So place your bets. With 11th gen, the longtime parity error and L0 bugs introduced with Skylake were finally resolved, and you got AVX512.

    While there's still issues to be worked out on 12th gen, you get the best of every world on 11th gen. My 12900K is sitting here waiting for some DDR5. This 11900K is bug free, doesn't require disabling efficiency cores for games , and has AVX512. Not to mention a PC is more than a CPU. PCIE4.0 (something my Ryzen rigs enjoyed for years), or Z590's other I/O updates with adoption of Bluetooth 5.2/wifi6E, TB4/USB4.0, I say that 11th gen are the most derided and underrated CPU releases that I've seen in years.

    Happy to see more software utilizing AVX512, and I'm still recommending CPUs that have this instruction set. Or at least people should be aware and not so dismissive of it.

    The problem with 11th gen wasn't the performance. It was extremely competitive and the AVX512 did help in limited scenarios. HOWEVER it generated a tremendous amount of heat and used a lot of power. The platform was also incredibly expensive making it's value proposition dubious.
    Reply
  • kinney
    digitalgriffin said:
    The problem with 11th gen wasn't the performance. It was extremely competitive and the AVX512 did help in limited scenarios. HOWEVER it generated a tremendous amount of heat and used a lot of power. The platform was also incredibly expensive making it's value proposition dubious.

    Everything is expensive now. At least 12th gen is. With my 12th gen build I'm definitely spending more than I did on my 11th gen. That said, I do use mITX exclusively. Motherboards are cheaper on the AMD side. You can eliminate the heat/power by changing the default bios option (MCE) off like GN and other outlets did, but then the performance looks mediocre, or 'competitive' as you put it. An 11900K left in its stock configuration? Pretty much a beatdown and few realized it.
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    I don't experience any issues though, I'm idling 90% of the time. I want the fastest gaming rig I can get when I actually use it for gaming so the power/heat complaints never made much sense to me. Kind of a fanboy's argument every generation, whoever is faster and hotter gets attacked for that by those that only buy the opposing brand. When most people, IF they even use their PCs for anything other than browsing, are normally idling.

    Good motherboards are expensive now, but I view things in opportunity cost as well. If bothering with a build I wanted Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4.0 or I would've stayed with my 5900X. Finally getting PCIE4 on one of my Intel rigs was also an attraction.
    Reply