I would love to know if any of these have the oomph for running Dolphin with hi-res texture packs. That sort of "going beyond the original experience" is the main reason I'd bother to use "real hardware" for emulation over something like a Pi or a jailbroken Switch. (Or, for that matter, a MiSTer.)
I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV.
It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.
for emulation a midrange graphics card and a i7 or i9 intel chip with high single core speed from the last few years is best - you can get something second hand for very cheap that will perform emulation as well as the ryzen 4 4090
That’s the thing about the 2009 Mac mini in particular…it came with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M whereas most of the other models have integrated Intel graphics.
I actually used to have a 2009 Mac Mini (long since sold); I promise you, it didn't run Dolphin well even at 1080p. It barely kept up to 20FPS on some games.
The 9400M is still an integrated card. It was better than what Intel had at the time but it still lacked it's own memory and is still terrible by today's standards. Only the G4 Mac Minis and some models of the 2011 Mac Mini have a dedicated GPu.
I read "Ryzen 4" and did a double-take. Confusingly Zen 4 is the CPU generation, and Ryzen 3/5/7/9 is the performance tier (core count and price) within a generation.
To be clear, I'm not asking about just "emulating these consoles", but rather emulating these consoles with injected 4K assets; three-pass RDMAed 8K stencil-buffering for emulation of GPU-unified-memory in compositing of shadows + reflections; 16x SSAA to smooth off all the jaggies; etc. Y'know, all those options that, when turned on, make a four-generations-old game into a game that looks like it came out yesterday.
You still don't need a 4090 to do all that — but you need more than a 1660, I promise you. (For one thing, just for holding all those 4K assets, for a game that never unloads anything because it thinks it has rather small assets!)
I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV.
It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.