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The other sibling comments were talking about general C++ vs C# performance, but I wanna get into some emulation specific context here that's missing. I was one of the contributors to the yuzu project since it was first started, and so I'm fairly familiar with the challenges of switch emulation, albeit I'm not going to pretend like I was one of the all-star devs responsible for making the magic happen. (I've recently stopped contributing to the project in order to pursue other interests, so i'm going to keep the information here general and not specific in case somethings changed in the last month.) Let's start off by breaking the core performance portions of emulation into a few broad categories. There's CPU emulation, for running the actual guest exe, Kernel and OS emulation for handling the system calls that games make, and GPU emulation for translating the guest's GPU work into modern graphics API that your PC can use. Now let's compare how language overhead will affect each of these main scopes. CPU Emulation - Both yuzu and Ryujinx use JIT compilation to recompile the guest ARMv8 instructions into x64 at runtime. The specifics of the two emulators JITs are pretty different, and it'd be cool to go into more details, but the mile high view is a comparison of C# vs C++ isn't going to have much of an effect on the runtime difference. At least not near as much performance gap between techniques and optimization levels that the JIT is capable of. The goal of JIT compilation for CPU code is to remove as much interpreter overhead as possible, so if your choice of programming language is slowing down the JIT, that suggests that you have somewhere else to improve in the JIT ;) Kernel/OS - This is the area that will have the largest performance difference between implementation languages, but with the major caveat that Kernel and OS emulation requires the least amount of processing power out of the 3 categories mentioned here. The Kernel and OS are responsible for managing and scheduling threads, handling network connections, and etc, but really most of these things have fairly low impact on final application performance in comparison to CPU and GPU emulation.
As a side note, emulators aren't the only groups interested in switch OS/Kernel work. The open source Atmosphere custom firmware for the switch is working through recreating an open source kernel/os for the switch, and the two emulators benefit from their work too. (See the licensing exemptions here https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere#licensing) GPU Emulation - This is probably the trickiest part of Switch emulation, and once again, it comes down to how you emulate it, and not the language you use to write the emulator. The biggest performance differences between the GPU emulation of the two emulators will boil down to technique differences, and not the programming language. GPU emulation performance can be roughly broken into two parts, the "actual" gpu running time, and the state management/conversion. There's only so much an emulator can do about the actual GPU running time since at some level, you are going to need to run the game's GPU code, but the other half is a whole lotta code to avoid doing more work, and much of the GPU performance optimizations goes here. Things like managing the game's GPU memory, avoiding changing or querying GPU state unless necessary, converting nvidia shader ASM into SPIR-V or GLSL, and so on, are not generally going to be bottlenecked on the emulator's language of choice, but on the algorithms and designs that you use.
Also a side note, the average comment about how "easy" switch emulation is because of "off the shelf nvidia parts" really misunderstands just how much work goes into this part. Switch emulation benefits greatly from the open source nvidia reverse engineering efforts from teams like nouveau, and others working on open source GPU acceleration on the switch like https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d but also a great deal of effort from the switch emu devs themselves, writing tests cases to run on the switch to find edge cases and document behavior. It definitely is not easy work. At the end of the day, every drop of performance counts, but some drops are much much larger than others. As such, the advantages of any language's performance characteristics will be heavily offset by the design choices the emulator uses. The creator of ryujinx is very comfortable with C#, and with good development practices, there's no intrinsic reason that one cannot achieve good performance in a C# emulator. And if one decides that it's worth the tradeoff to do some extra work for performance in exchange for a more comfortable development environment, then I say let them do what they want. Shoutouts to both the yuzu and Ryujinx teams for all their hard work. I loved working on emulators a lot, and highly recommend anyone who's interested in contributing to give it a shot, its a really challenging and rewarding kind of project where there's always something new to learn about in a broad array of subjects. |