Emulation on the Lenovo Legion Go

[Music] hey everybody this is rer Metro game Corp today we're going to do an emulation showcase for the Lenovo Legion go I've been testing out this handheld for the past few days now getting ready for a final in-depth review which I'll do later this week however when I was doing all of my emulation testing I realized that I just had way too much footage to put in that review and so instead we're going to break it all off and put it into this video here and my goal by the end of this video is that you'll know exactly what kind of emulation performance you can expect on this device and we're going to cover everything all the way back from the 8bit era up until the more modern systems that can be emulated and we do have a couple ground rules that I want to set before we get started number one this is going to be an outof boox experience that means I'm not going to go in and Fiddle with the BIOS or GPU and CPU clock speeds instead we're going to use all the tools we have available within the legion space software that ships with a device and that's because I want to make sure you know exactly what kind of performance performance you're going to get even though you may be able to tweak it to get a little bit further and I will give some tips and tricks along the way and the second ground rule is I'm going to make these games as pretty as I can while doing this emulation so if the emulator has the ability to upscale resolution within those games I'm going to do that and I'm going to try to match what the resolution is on the Lenovo Legion go screen anyway that's all there really is to it I'm going to try to make these games look and play as good as possible using the tools that come with the device out of the box and in this video I'm going to Showcase over 50 different games across a wide variety of platforms and I always love making these videos because it gives me an excuse to play around with retro games all day anyway let's go ahead and get [Music] started okay as we get into it let me talk about a couple of the tools that I use just to help out with this showcase number one I'm not a huge fan of the stats overlay that comes with Legion space so we're going to use a different one that's been preconfigured by an app called handheld Companion now generally this app is used to emulate controllers or to enable gyroscope in addition it has other features like adjusting the TDP now officially handheld companion does not support the Lenova Legion go just yet so I didn't use any of those features all I really did was just turn on the statistical overlay and so that's what we use to see like the CPU and GPU utilization as well as the frames per second now when it came to actually setting up all the emulators I used another tool called emu deck and you might have heard of this if you're familiar with the steam deck there is a Windows version but it's currently in a Beta release so you have to be a patreon member to have it and I've made a whole setup guide video about it a few months back and the plan is that UDC for Windows is going to move from an early access build into a public build sometime before the end of this year either way if you're interested in checking out that early access build beforehand I'll leave a link to my video down below anyway once all that's set up you can basically access all of your emulation tools through the Steam Big Picture menu so in addition to the Steam games that I've already installed onto this device if I tab over to the non steam tab you can see that I have a collection of all these other emulated games now this isn't every single game that I have on this system but really just the best of the best that I want to have in my steam interface and I love the fact that I can access all my favorite emulated games right here just like I would any other steam game and launching these is just as simple as starting up one of those you just press the a button to get it started and away we go anyway this tool is 100% not necessary to get set up for all these emulators but I do like the fact that it streamlines that process now another tool I like to use within Windows machines to kind of collect my emulated systems is one called emulation station desktop Edition and this is something that you can also install as part of the UDC process now this one's a little bit different it basically has all of those emulated games allinone but because it's a single system and I can navigate through all these games it's also a really great alternative and the setup process for emulation station is in that other muck video that I mentioned before either way that's just a quick look at how I have all this setup so that I can navigate through my games and start them right up very easily and there are quite a few other launchers and front ends that you could also use like launchbox or play night either way this is not a tutorial but a showcase so let's go ahead and start moving into the games themselves now we're going to start with the Nintendo Entertainment System not because I have any worries about whether or not any of these games will play but rather I'd like to showcase the fact that a 16 X10 aspect ratio like on the Lenova Legion go is a really excellent aspect ratio when it comes to playing original 4x3 content because 6x10 is taller that means that you're going to fill up more of the screen with the 4x3 another great thing about the Lenovo Legion go is that it is quite powerful and so if you'd like you can apply something like a really heavyduty Shader for example the one we're using with dragon warrior right here is called CRT Royale this is one of the more heavyweight shaders that are available within retroarc and I really love this one because it does very much so mimic that CRT experience even on an LCD panel so when it comes to playing those classic systems Nintendo and Super Nintendo Sega Genesis all of that 8 bit and 16-bit era these are all going to display at a 4x3 and fill up a lot of that screen and because the Z1 extreme chip is so efficient we're going to be able to play this for hours on end and I'll be sure to do a full battery test in my final review which will be coming out later now admittedly I don't think the d-pad is perfect when it comes to Retro Gaming I think it's more oriented to Modern games where you're like switching out a weapon but all the same unless you're a d-pad purist I think it'll get the job done another system that looks excellent on a 16 X10 aspect ratio is the Game Boy Advance this one originally had a 3x2 aspect ratio so a little bit wider than 4x3 and as a result it's almost the perfect match for the Lenova Legion go and playing these games on a big old screen like this you really have to see it to believe it because it is pretty amazing it does kind of feel like Overkill here and there but all the same if you want to play Game Boy Advance in like the ultimate way this definitely fits that bill now moving up from there we have our 3D based systems this is where things get really interesting number one because we're using 3D polygons we can start to upscale the resolution so for example with the Nintendo 64 right here I'm using a 6X resolution and the upscale resolution will really vary between each of these because it did depend on the game but as a general rule a six times resolution of the Nintendo 64 will give you at least a 1440p upscale and of course the CPU in the Lenova Legion go can handle this absolutely no problem and it'll be exactly the same for other 3D based systems like the Sony PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast another emulated system that does really well an upscale resolution is Sony PSP and this one can also handle a 6X resolution absolutely no problem and if you do the math here it's over 1600p resolution so it's actually higher of a resolution than what the screen itself can handle so here we are pushing the max pixels that we can for Sony PSP on the Lenova Legion go and it looks amazing the PSP is really a treasure of a system because when you upscale this one it looks basically as good as PS2 it's pretty incredible either way yes PSP is going to be absolutely great on this and even God of War chains of Olympus one of the hardest games to emulate runs like a dream even at 6X now one system that did give me a little bit of trouble was a Saturn and this one's always been pretty dang hard to emulate now we're going to be using the most demanding as well as accurate core within retroarch this one here is called Beetle and the thing about it is that it doesn't upscale the resolution at all but it does give you an experience very similar to the original console and if you want to play games like this you'll have absolutely no problem on the legion go however one of my favorite things to do with Sega Saturn is to also use those heavy duty shaders and unfortunately that is where you'll start to see a sort of performance bottleneck and truth be told this isn't that the chip itself can't handle it it has to do something with these CPU and GPU clocks that they've enabled by default on the Le and go because even with this Shader enabled this chip is way powerful enough to be able to play these games at full speed but as you can see on the top right we are getting a dip in the frames per second here and there and this is where things can also get a little bit complicated when it comes to the setting instead of using the typical 15 watt balance setting that I usually will use for this one in particular I found that you have to go and push it up to the 20 W performance setting and even even then depending on the game you won't get it at full speed if you are using a heavy duty Shader but you actually do have a couple options right here number one would be just to disable that Shader and play it as is but another thing I found is that when you plug in the device it'll boost up those clocks I'm not 100% sure what's actually happening here with the math but you can see here with the virtual of Fighter 2 it went from an average of 55 frames per second to a full 60 frames with absolutely no issue when plugging it in so if you really want to play Sega Saturn games in like the optimal condition with this be core and a nice Shader then you may want to plug it in if you have that available and this is just one of the many wonky things that I found when doing my emulation testing we'll get into a couple more of these later in the video now moving on let's go to Generation 6 this is going to be GameCube PS2 and the original Xbox we're going to start with Gamecube here and we're going to do a 4X resolution that's going to be a 1920p resolution depending on the game that you're playing which again is going to be more than enough for the 1600p resolution on the Lenova Legion go now the GameCube was also or originally a 4x3 system and just like with those other classic consoles this one is also going to look amazing on the screen and as you can imagine a 4X up scill of the original GameCube looks really awesome and in the testing that I did I found every single game I tried played it full speed you might get a couple here and there that you'll have to drop down to a 3X resolution but even that is going to look amazing on this big screen it's a similar story with PlayStation 2 although it is not quite as performant as the GameCube however for most games you will be able to play at a 4X resolution this this is going to be very similar to an 1800p resolution so again it's going to be more than enough pixels for the display itself however there will be a good portion of games maybe the top 5% where you will have to drop it down to a 3X resolution instead of four and that's going to be those really heavyweight games like God of War I or champions of norath regardless this is still higher of a resolution than 1080p so it's still going to look great on this device so if anything I would say if you're interested in playing PlayStation 2 on a handheld this is going to be one of the best experiences out there next I want to talk about emulation of the original Xbox on Windows now there are two different emulators we have available and to be honest neither of them are perfect but for this example we're going to use the zmu emulator and like I mentioned Xbox emulation on Windows is not that great there will be quite a few games that are playable but you probably won't be able to upscale them for example at a native resolution I'm still getting a little bit of dip here and there and even then to get these games to work you really have to crank up the power so I'm using a full 30 W TDP right here and this is going to eat through your battery pretty quickly you get about 90 minutes altogether and even then you'll see slowdown in quite a few games dead or Life 3 does not quite play at full speed and other more intensive 3D games like Project Gotham Racing yeah you can forget about it this one plays at about half speed now generally what I like to do with the original Xbox is try to play it via Linux because the zimu emulator in Linux seems to be a lot more optimized overall and generally what I do is I test a custom Linux firmware called Basera and this one can be loaded via an SD card or even a USB drive however I I found that when booting up the device and pressing the F2 button to get into the legion bios there is an option to configure it so that it will boot from a USB drive before it boots Windows itself and it's a pretty standard practice to have these boot options within the BIOS and we have them here unfortunately I did find that after swapping this out it would just still boot into Windows anyway so there could be a couple things going on right here maybe the flash drive is not being recognized as a bootable drive or there's something else that needs to happen on the legion bios in order to enable this either way as it stands I was not a able to boot into Basera using the various tricks that I usually will so hopefully this is something we'll see as an update either through the BIOS or through a Basera update so that we can start playing it on this device however as it stands I would say that Xbox emulation on the legion go is not super great right now okay moving on let's talk about a couple Nintendo systems we'll start with Nintendo 3DS to start we're going to use a 5x resolution with the latest Citra nightly build and also bear in mind that a 5x resolution is going to be on both screens so it's kind of d doubling the performance requirement there but as you can see these games are all playing really great even upscale this High bear in mind though that for some of these systems like 3DS you'll get a couple dips here and there as the shaders First Cash and so initially you might get a little bit of slowdown in the beginning but the longer you play these games the better they will be and yeah I would say that based on my own testing 3DS is going to be absolutely no problem 5x maybe not for every single game but for most of them next up we have Nintendo Wii U this is always one of my favorite consoles to emulate on any handheld and that's because this is such an efficient emulator and all these games are going to run great now some may have some graphical issues for example Mario Tennis Ultra smash has always had a problem with the ryzen 7000 series and so those diagonal graphic lines that you're seeing in the footage is pretty common with a lot of other systems however for most others you'll have an excellent experience in fact you can upscale many of these as well so for example with Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess HD I can upscale this to a 1200p resolution and this one also has the ability to natively scale to 16 X10 as as well and one of the coolest things about this is that even though we're upscaling it and also using a larger aspect ratio the game is still playing at a full speed and only requiring a 9 watt TDP that means that it's less power hungry than like PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube in other games you can upscale even more here is New Super Mario Brothers U running at a 1440p resolution and it's hard to overstate how awesome this looks on a big old screen like this and you can do a similar thing with Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD this one can also run at a, 1400p upscale and the power demands will be fairly light as well under a 15 wat TTP Now by far the most demanding game on the Nintendo Wii U catalog is Legend of Zelda breath of the wild and so for this one I'm only going to do a 1200p upscale but I'm also going to use that 16 X10 aspect ratio because it's available in this game as well so we are getting a beautiful full screen experience now there was another Quirk here that I wanted to show off and that is that I found that the performance mode or the 20 W TDP setting seemed to work the best with this game and the interesting thing was that at this 20 wat setting I was getting an average of maybe about 42 frames per second which I think is very much so playable however if I switch it over to the custom build which is at 30 wat TDP right now the emulator will certainly grab all that extra power and push it up to close to a 30 wat TDP but the interesting thing is that the performance is going to tank instead of getting a higher than 42 frames per second it goes down to about 25 and that's because of the 30 W TDP setting what it does is it boosts more into the CP U and takes away a bit from the GPU and with this game in particular that's the opposite of what we want for good emulation in fact if we switch over to the balanced or auto mode which is a 15 watt TDP setting we're actually going to get better performance than the 30 wat TDP setting so now we're getting an average of about 35 frames per second but only demanding about half the power that we did at 30 watts and then of course like I mentioned if we bump it back up to the 20 watt setting or the performance mode you should see an average of about 42 frames per second so that's what I think is the sweet spot for this game in particular particular and so the lesson here is that if you're trying to emulate a system and it's not quite running as good as you might think the solution may not be to give it more power it may actually be trying to use a different power setting and that's because the Lenovo settings have different clock speeds for CPU and GPU depending on the mode that you choose so there will be a little bit of guesstimation on your part when trying to play some of these heavier Duty games speaking of power profiles let's move over to the next system because this one is also pretty interesting to start there are quite a few games that you can play at the 15 watt TDP settings and they'll all run at full speed so examples here are going to be after burner climax as well as dead or Live 5 however as you start to get into the more 3D based games you know something like Devil May Cry this one will require the performance mode or 20 watt TDP and so if you are playing one of these games and you're starting to see a little bit of slowdown here and there and you're at the 15 watt setting then I would bump it up to 20 and I found that this is the general sweet spot when it comes to PS3 emulation many 3D based games you know like Heavenly sword as well as Ratchet and Clank quest for booty each of these will will play very close to a full speed Ratchet and Clank would dip down every once in a while but I still found it perfectly acceptable for me it's all about smooth gameplay and Ratchet and Clank quest for booty runs great as long as it's over 30 frames per second after that everything's just kind of icing on the cake anyway yes for the vast majority of PS3 games I found that 20 W TDP was just perfect and there are quite a few that will run even lower at a 15 wat TDP and I think that the perfect 20 watt example is going to be Prince of Persia right here in the open world of the desert it usually will bog down quite a bit but I have gone in and tweaked the settings to allow it to go over 30 frames per second which is what it ran natively and here you can see that it is Comfortably above 30 frames per second as I'm playing that means if you want to just keep it at 30 frames per second and play it like how it was on the original PS3 you can do that and it's not going to require as much power as we're seeing right now and even then it's still only running at 20 watts so you will be able to get less than that now there will be some games that require more power something like Infamous and even God of War 3 is possible on this machine however some of these games may require you to manually adjust the GPU clocks and like I said we're keeping everything within the stock software at least in this video but if you want to learn more ET Prime just recently did a video about it a couple days ago where he manually showed you how to adjust those GPU clocks and so I'm going to leave that video linked down below so you can specifically see how to tweak that as well as how God of War 3 will actually run on this machine next I want to move over to the Xbox 360 now this one's kind of unique as well in the fact that I found that nothing over 20 watts actually improved my performance when I was trying to emulate so even though I could push 30 WTS into it all it was doing was wasting power at that point because I wasn't getting any higher of a frame rate and I will say that for Xbox 360 I would get a dip here and there with 3D based games like Crackdown and even Forza Horizon would dip down here and there as well so in my estimation this probably has to do something with the default settings within Legion space but then also you have to bear in mind that we're using an older driver set here that came with the Lenova Legion go and I've definitely seen better performance with this exact same chip on the r Ally and my guess here is that as more and more people get the legion go and provide feedback to Lenovo about it we're probably going to see a lot of optimizations down the line like with this steam deck and the Rog Ally things got better over time and since this device just came out last week I do expect things to improve in the future okay and finally let's talk about Nintendo switch emulation this will be our last system of the day and there are a couple interesting notes here that I want to go over number one by default most emulators will work better with the Vulcan back end over openg GL however I did find that with the Yuzu emulator the openg GL one performed better let's do a quick example with a couple of the more lightweight games that you can emulate starting here with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe you can see here in the Vulcan back end we're getting an average of like 30 35 frames per second that is not great however if we switch it over to open GL which theoretically should not be quite as performant we're getting a steady 60 frames per second this is one of those systems that have Shader compilations so you will get a dip here and there in the beginning of each level but like I mentioned before with 3DS the longer you play play it the better will get here's another example Super Mario 3D World and this one is a very easy game to emulate however with the Vulcan backend which should be more performant we're getting about 30 frames per second and the interesting thing here is that even if you crank up the TDP to a full 30 Watts it's never going to take that much here in the Vulcan back end I was averaging about 18 or 19 Watts instead however when we switch it over to openg GL we will get those full 60 frames per second but it will also demand that full 30 wat TDP at the same time so there is a bit of a balance here between the fact that the Vulcan back end seems to not require as much power but it's also not running at full speed and that might be why it's not running at full speed is because it's not taking advantage of all that power you should have either way this is definitely an optimization issue with this specific software because again the Z1 extreme chip of the r Ally doesn't have these same problems another thing to bear in mind is that compatibility with openg GL can sometimes be a little bit wonky for example here with Metroid Prime remastered this one runs just great however I was seeing a lot of textures not being fully present for example with the arm Cannon all you can see is just like a black shape it should have all sorts of great things happening right there so this is a game that does run at full speed but I don't really like playing it just because the textures are not fully there so at least for me when it comes to Performance I found that Nintendo switch was probably one of the hardest games to actually get right and there are so many factors at play as to why this may not be working perfectly number one like I mentioned the driver package that comes with this device is a little bit outdated and unfortunately if you try to sideload your own drivers it can cause other complications in other areas in addition I think that this CPU and GPU clocks for each of the performance modes need a little bit more fine-tuning and this is something you can do manually to improve performance but I would much rather have it out of the box also by the way if you do want to give a little bit of boost in performance with a Nintendo switch the plug-in trick that I did with Sega Saturn also seems to work here either way the way I see it Nintendo switch emulation is pretty good right now on the Lenova Legion go but I bet in a few months it'll be even better a couple other things worth noting for my initial testing is that if you pull off the joycons and and just use them like that they will connect absolutely no problem and the emulators will pick up on it and it'll play just great so if you do want to play these games in a desktop kind of mode you can totally do that however out of the box I did not find any way to get the gyro working and so even though emulators like the Yuzu one should be able to pick up on your gyro motion input at least right now I couldn't get it working out of the box and again this is probably something that a third-party app or more refinements will probably take care of okay and next I wanted to show off this game just a little bit just to show you what kind of performance you can expect but bear in mind I am using a couple backend things on the Yuzu emulation side number one I'm using a 1080p upscale so that makes it a little bit nicer looking on this larger screen and bear in mind all these switch games are running at docked mode which means it's going to show a higher output resolution and as you can see with this game it's not quite getting anywhere close to 30 frames per second I'm getting an average of about 18 to 20 right now and again this is quite a bit worse than what I was expecting from the Z1 extreme so if anything I wouldn't consider this to be a complaint about the emulation but really just a showcase to show that yes some of these games still are not quite there and this is very typical in the kind of growing pain situation that we're in with a brand new device anyway when all is said and done I do think that emulation on the Lenovo Legion go is really good in the first week and to be honest it's much better than some of those other large manufacturer handhelds like the steam deck and the r Ally in their first week as well so we are off to a good start and I am excited to see how things will be going in the future as well so let me know what you think in the comments down below if you're picking up a Lenova Legion go is emulation even on your radar or after seeing the emulation potential of this device does it make it a little bit more of an enticing buy regardless let me know what you think in the comments down below I'm pretty happy with the performance right now but I'm definitely not at the point where I'm going to be moving over some of my favorite save games from like the steam deck over onto this one but that's definitely something that I could see happening in the future anyway thanks for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 280,190

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Id: 5uGk-zPFoXg

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023