Deku_Scrub wrote on 2022-02-02, 20:35:
Now I'm also wondering, what specs are needed ideally for the Debian x86 version, to have best performance with PS3 games, X360, or whichever platforms tend to be most demanding? I've got a couple SB/IVB i5 towers that might be well-suited, although ideally I'd like to keep them as overkill WinXP / pretty good Win7 gaming desktops. Would a Core 2 or Phenom II (with USB 3 addon card), or maybe laptop i3/i5 get the job done? How much RAM and local storage (to boot the Debian VM, not the big RetroNAS drive) would be needed for best results?
Edit: I probably should have specified, how much CPU/RAM/Storage do I need to devote to the Debian VM itself? Because even if I'm told "Core 2 Quad is enough," I still don't know whether the VM needs more than one core for best performance...
If you check the wiki attached to the project page, I try to put numbers in those (also the instructional videos I do network monitoring to show the usage).
For PS2, things never really spike much over 10Mbit/s from the limited testing I did. If you dabble with emulators you'll probably be aware that some fussier games can crash if virtual optical drives read too fast. Often the tools used to simulate optical drives are slowed down to genuine drive speed to ensure stability. By spec the console's 4x DVD drive can read at a maximum speed of around 5MB/s / 50Mbit/s, but rarely gets there in practice. Certainly when streaming video and audio, it's quite a deal less.
PS3 I saw get to 400Mbit/s when installing Skyrim to the PS3's internal HDD (mandatory for that game), likely bottlenecked by the very slow spindle disk I have in my PS3 (I'd like to re-test with an SSD, and see how fast that can go on the PS3's internal SATA1 port capped at 1.5Gbit/s). During regular game loading of other titles that didn't HDD install, speeds of around 200Mbit/s were common. The hardware's internal optical drive caps out at a very low 72Mbit/s (around 8MB/s), so network game loading becomes substantially faster there, and games are less crash-prone as they are deigned to work fine off the internal hard disk as well for digital titles.
So what do you need performance wise? A stock RPi4 is a quad-core 1.5GHz ARM CPU. I'd guestimate somewhere in the order of a hypothetical Intel Core 2 Quad at about 1GHz (depends on what features you're talking about, but that's ballpark). RAM wise it depends on the number of services you're loading up, but 2GB for a GUI-less system would probably even be OK.
Your biggest bottleneck is IO, with the RPi3 being a bit garbage because of everything attached to the USB2 bus (storage and network). RPi4 really wins out here with a dedicated 1GbE network card and USB3 for storage, when combined can happily hit 900Mbit/s or more from my testing. On an old PC you've got the benefit of PCIE attached devices and SATA2+ depending on hardware. Total overkill for a lowly PS2/PS3 device.
I haven't put any time into testing XBox360 yet, but its 12X DVD caps out at 16.5MB/s or around 170ish Mbit/s, which again is miles under what most GbE NICs and even large spindle drives can deliver, so I suspect it's a similar story.
Same on the computer side. SMB1 will probably blast down the line at speeds your Win95 box can only dream of even on low spec hardware. EtherDFS is an interesting beast because of how unique it is, but several kind volunteers have provided benchmarks on real hardware (check the github wiki for numbers).
VM wise, I always recommend 2 CPUs minimum. 1 CPU bottlenecks on IO wait in Linux systems, and given that this is a NAS, having 2 CPUs for your VM is a good idea. That doesn't mean it's going to use 100% of 2 CPUs all day long. Just that the way that CPU and IO scheduling in Linux works, it is easier for it to walk and chew gum in that configuration, and latencies drop quite a bit.
davidrg wrote on 2022-02-02, 22:20:I think you'd probably find a Raspberry Pi as suggested in the initial post would do just fine too and use a lot less electricity than the PCs
Definitely a big incentive for RPi hardware. An RPi4 struggles to consume 5W, compared to say the 65W of a Core2Duo.