Question Increasing vram on pi for emulation

[Sisko22]

So somewhere I read that emulation is more of a GPU thing than ram or CPU.
This had me thinking if there was a way to change ram to vram on a raspberry pi would it make it a more powerful emulation machine?
And is there even a way to change normal ram into vram on a pi?

Note I'm new here so if there is a better place for this let me know.

 

[Shank]

I'm not too deep into the world of Pis, but from my understanding, emulation is usually more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. A primary VRAM guzzler in gaming is to store bigger, higher resolution textures, which isn't particularly relevant for emulation. I believe the Pi uses unified memory, and from a quick google search, it looks like you can choose how its allocated with this guide here.

 

[StonedEdge]

By the way, the amount of GPU performance increase (literally 2-3 fold) required to run GC/Wii/PS2 titles on a Pi 4 is insane. The VideoCore GPU on the Pi 4 is so old by today's standards, is built on a very old node and it caps out its GPU clock speed of 900Mhz at an absolute maximum. Even then, the system becomes very unstable. It's a very low powered GPU - I'd give up any hope on running 3D games (which do in fact use a lot of GPU power) on this device if that's your goal.

 

[Sisko22]

By the way, the amount of GPU performance increase (literally 2-3 fold) required to run GC/Wii/PS2 titles on a Pi 4 is insane. The VideoCore GPU on the Pi 4 is so old by today's standards, is built on a very old node and it caps out its GPU clock speed of 900Mhz at an absolute maximum. Even then, the system becomes very unstable. It's a very low powered GPU - I'd give up any hope on running 3D games (which do in fact use a lot of GPU power) on this device if that's your goal.

Thank you! That is actually pretty cool to learn, I have the most mastalgia for 2d games anyways, there's just a few PS2 games I'd love to emulate from childhood.