Comparison To Traditional Models
Compared to LLE, HLE has a very different set of design decisions and trade-offs. First, as the complexity of modern (fifth generation and above) video consoles rapidly increases, so does their computational power, and also the distance to the commodity PCs, which are the most common host systems for the emulators. Thus, the requirements on the quality of the emulated services increases, together with the difficulty of doing so. Hardware chips in consoles are usually extremely specialised towards specific functionality needed by games written for them, often in directions which are completely different than those taken by the hardware in an average PC machine. For example, 3D graphics might be realised by an extremely fast integer processor, coupled with the assumption of main system memory being the same as graphics memory, taking away the separate step of loading textures.
Emulating such an architecture programmatically on a PC, characterised by the emphasis put on floating-point operations, and specialised graphics hardware with memory separate from the system memory would be extremely difficult, especially taking into account the scarcity of documentation typical for specialised, proprietary hardware. Even if such an emulator could be created, it may be too slow for use. An HLE emulator would take the data to be processed, along with the operations list, and implement it using the means available on the host systems. Floating-point math and GPU operations could be performed natively. The result is not only a much better match with the host platform, but often significantly better results, as floating-point computation yields higher quality graphics suitable for high resolution displays available for PCs.
Read more about this topic: High-level Emulation
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