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

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.